I want to welcome Joel Thierstein and thank him for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources on Education series on Terra Incognita. Joel will be sharing some of his experiences and writing on the topic of “The Role Of University Faculty In The OER World,” which will provide the opportunity to open a conversation on the critical role of faculty in the ecosystem that supports the creation, distribution, use, and reuse of OER.

Dr. Joel Thierstein serves as the Associate Provost for Innovative Scholarly Communication at Rice University and Executive Director of Connexions. Prior to coming to Rice, Joel served as an Associate Professor and Director of New Media Communications at Oregon State University. He also served as a professor at Baylor University, Purdue University Calumet, and Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Dr. Thierstein has also served as a visiting professor of Communications Law at Syracuse University.

Writing extensively in telecommunications, Joel’s books include Birds In Flight: Satellites In The New Millennium, 3rd ed. and Religion, Law and Freedom: A Global Perspective. In addition, to Joel’s obvious commitment to open and sustainable education, he also has served as a Board member of Fossil Rim Wildlife Center since 2000 and Board Chair since 2003, and has worked extensively with the Conservation Centers for Species Survival.

Although I was aware of Joel’s work through Connexions, I did not have the opportunity to meet him until a meeting that Wayne Mackintosh called in Vancouver about a year ago, during which we discussed the use of wikis to support development, management, and presentation of educational content. Incidentally I also first met Christine Geith and Leigh Blackall at this meeting, who have also contributed to this our Series. Unfortunately at the time, I did not have the opportunity to really speak with Joel during the meeting, so here is an opportunity for all of us to take advantage of sharing ideas about the critical topic that Joel will be outline for us. In any event, please feel free to comment (early and often!), ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.

“The Business of Open Source,” the twenty first installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was posted on April 11, 2008, by Stuart Sim. Stuart serves as the Chief Technology Officers and Chief Architect of Moodlerooms, which provides comprehensive technical support services to the Moodle course management system open source software. Thanks, Stuart, for a great posting!

In his posting, Stuart raises some of the challenges of building a business model for wrapping services around intellectual property (IP) that is open. He points out that providing services for IP that you own provides an element of control that you do not have while supporting OSS. Your success with open IP is based entirely on the value proposition of your services.

Stuart clearly communicates that there are significant benefits to providing services for OSS as well as challenges. First, working in the OSS space provides a strong impetus to innovate and manage risk. For example, code visibility provides an advantage to commercial service providers who become part of the development community, spend time understanding the code and community, and contribute to the code. It is through this type of involvement that a service provider can better refine its risk model, reduce its risk premiums, and pass them on to customers.

The “punch line” of Stuart’s posting is that transparency leads to efficiency, efficiency to lower cost, and lower cost leads to more and happier customers/users. While code transparency provides opportunities for efficiencies, the inefficiencies associated with proprietary (closed) IP come, at least in part, from the non-competitive nature of how R&D is conducted and services are provided in closed software environments. The development of comprehensive and commercial service providers such as Moodlerooms, has eliminated, for some OSS products, the problem for end users of having great low cost software, but no options for external software support. The economics of open code allows smart service organizations to provide low-cost high-value services, and smart software users to take advantage of both low or non-existent license fees, and low cost services.

Comments
There were a few more general comments about model and what factors associated with specific OSS products/communties allow for a good commercial service support model. The conversation never really gained much traction, which is unfortunate. I think that the topic is incredibly important for OSS communities as well as organizations that adopt OSS into their core business systems, and customer facing parts of their value chain. So, in a while, I am going to take another stab at this topic and see if we can get a little more teased out of it. For now, I think that Stuart has provided some nice conceptual points to hang on to, and some foundation to build from, which are very important for a dialog that is still under exploration and development. Any suggestions for authors or approaches to expand on this topic would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks again to Stuart for his interesting and insightful post and responses. I also want to extend a big thank you to Steve Foerster for adding to the post, and other folks who have been reading along. On May 1st, Joel Thierstein, who serves as the Associate Provost for Innovative Scholarly Communication at Rice University and Executive Director of Connexions will be posting on “The Role Of University Faculty In The OER World.” The schedule for the series can be found on WikiEducator.

I just got back from the annual meeting of that American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC). Don’t let their web site fool you, it is an organization with a lot going on in some very relevant areas. I am not going to give a run down of the whole meeting now, although I might a bit later. I do want to mention two of the interesting activities presented at the meeting.

On the first evening, we were joined by colleagues from the Tecnológico de Monterrey who told us about an OER project that they launched recently. They experimented on a pretty large scale as users of content and reported back on their lessons learned. I hope to have them tell their story as part of the OSS & OER Impact in Education Series. So, hopefully more on that later. I think that examples of how OER are being used effectively at an institutional level is an important part of our dialog that should help inform institutions and individuals who are making OER available.

I also want to point you to an interesting Video Annotation technology that was demonstrated by David Ernst, who serves as the Director of Academic and Information Technology at the University of Minnesota’s College of Education & Human Development. VideoAnt is a web-based video annotation application that is still in early development, but shows a lot of promise. Right now it only deals with FLV (Flash video) files and it has a relatively small development team working on it, but it shows great promise. I hope that this project goes the OSS Community route and supports more non-proprietary file formats to maximize its impact on education. To learn more and have some fun, visit the VideoAnt site and try it out. Feel free to tell us what you think.

First off let me state the obvious and say that building a business that depends on open source is not an easy thing to do. If it was, there would a great deal more success stories out there.

Offering services around Intellectual Property (IP) you own, manage and control that no one else can replicate - or not easily any way, is a well understood model if not always executed in the best way. Grabbing hold of ‘free’ software and wrapping services in a completely transparent way means really understanding operational risk. Given that the same IP is available for anyone to do exactly the same thing and compete in your marketplace means your always fighting to innovate faster than the next guy and that can only be a good thing.

Personally, I love the idea of forcing my competitors to innovate.

The goal of course is to build a value proposition to the market that provides the highest quality of service at the lowest cost. The transparent nature of open source projects allow you to develop your own risk model where you can identify exposure and price your services competitively.

Visibility into the underlying source code is the first step. Those organizations that participate in the project community gain a much greater advantage than those listening from the outside. By contributing to the development of the code and gathering feedback from both the software users and fellow developers, a more refined risk model can be developed with lower risk premiums and therefore a greater competitive pricing model can be offered to the market.

The more obvious benefits that are more widely presented include reduced internal costs in two significant areas: research and development and support.

There are companies that invest nothing in R&D and, generally speaking, history has not been kind to them. This is especially true of software companies where very tight competition forces constant innovation. In a closed model that innovation has to be paid for by the customer and is often non-transparent so the true value is hard to assess.

The other major cost in a closed environment is the end user support where the model has to be developed and maintained internally and paid for entirely by the customer. Without the ability to share any proprietary material, the market is forced to accept whatever inefficient support model the supplier can offer.

Thankfully, we’re rapidly moving from the old days of having two extreme options. The first option is working in a world with locked down commercial licenses and no access to source code, while the second option on the other side was having all the code to play with and no support number to call for help or guidance.

Many companies sell software solutions under a commercial license where their customers get access to the source code for analyzing performance issues using their own profiling tools. For any organization that has their own technology team capable of compiling the application from source and inserting monitoring hooks, this can be a nice compromise where infrastructure risks can be managed internally but with the safety of external support should things go wrong.

It comes down to decomposition and transparency. The winners will be the ones that understand the market will reward companies offering choice of platform, services, support and leadership - none of which are dependent on each other.

Again, I love forcing people to innovate through disruption. If the game is not working for you then simply change the rules of the game.

SUNY Delhi is hosting the 2-3-98 Conference, which promises to be a VERY exciting event that couples the topic of Open Source Software in Higher Education with a MoodleMoot. The meeting will take place on June 19th and 20th and address the often-repeated questions of Total Cost of Ownership, Support and Quality as they apply generally to software acquisition, and specifically to open source software. These themes will carry through to the MoodleMoot on June 20th.

There are some things that I really like about this meeting. There is a great mix of issues and questions that are frequently asked, but not really understood. There is a great spectrum of university presentations and breakout sessions by participants that are “up to their elbows” in acquisition and deployment activities. There are some great OSS applications being featured and some really smart commercial organizations supporting the organizational use of OSS application and systems are participating. All of this great stuff should make for a great meeting. In addition, it is also great to see one of the SUNY schools stepping up and showing real leadership in the OSS community providing a forum for intelligent dialog about pressing issues on a national stage.

I want to welcome Stuart Sim and thank him for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources on Education series on Terra Incognita. Although his post was scheduled to appear on April 1st, 2008 (eastern U.S.), Stuart has run into problems that have delayed the posting. We will delay the posting by about a week. Stuart will be sharing some of his experiences with open source software from the perspective of a system architect and his activities in the business of supporting and growing open source applications.

Stuart Sim serves as the Chief Technology Officers and Chief Architect of Moodlerooms, which provides comprehensive technical support services to the Moodle course management system open source software. Stuart has spent the past 15 years developing enterprise solutions around the world in the education and financial sectors. His core expertise is in the design and delivery of large-scale implementations using combinations of classic and innovative development methodologies in distributed multi-disciplinary environments.

Prior to joining Moodlerooms, Stuart served as the Chief Architect of the Education Business Solutions group at Sun Microsystems. At Sun, he was involved with the development and promotion of open standards in education systems design to drive down the barrier of adoption of practical technical solutions using open source projects.

I met Stuart while I was working at the SUNY Learning Network and he was at Sun. Since then Stuart’s work has started to addresses some of the traditional concerns at universities about deploying an open source learning management system, opening opportunities for schools of varying capacity. Please feel free to comment (early and often!), ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.