Well, a lot of folk in the prep school world seem to be fairly skeptical about this year's BETT show - missing the wow factor, as well as bemoaning the quality of the freebies this time round. I'm not so sure. I didn't get much time to look round on Thursday, but I must say I came away feeling fairly positive about the show.
My talk with Terry Freedman for the BCS on "Social technologies and learning in your classroom: blogs, wikis, podcasts and more", had attracted a big audience - we'd been booked for the biggest of the seminar theatres and apparently the tickets had all gone well in advance, with a long queue outside (past the Moodle stand!) for standing room at the back. Alas, 45' really wasn't enough time to do our subject justice, but it seemed well received, and we both got some great feedback afterwards. I've uploaded the slides, and emap are going to make the audio available as a podcast. I was delighted to see fellow Moodler Ulrike Montgomery in the audience, over from Germany with a number of colleagues especially for the show, and also enjoyed meeting Peter Levy of Curriki, who's doing some very exciting work with open content at school level over in the states.
Talking of Moodle stands, this year's official presence is under the auspices of the four UK moodle.com partners, and has, as you'd expect, a far more professional feel than our humble hugtob efforts of a year ago. I'm told that they've been fairly busy. Atomwide are also showing some Moodle stuff, as the host for both Bucks and West Sussex, and Edugeek have a real life Moodle "evangelist" shipped over from the states, in the shape of Art Lader, who I was delighted to finally meet yesterday.
Open source generally seems to have a higher profile this time round. Open Forum Europe have a jolly busy little stand up in the software village, playing host to a number of open source SMEs, including Richard Rothwell's new venture, M6-IT, as well as Ubuntu, whose representative has been blogging about the show. Even more impressive was the Blue Loop Internet Cafe, only here as, allegedly, Becta/Microsoft pulled out of the cybercafe space just before the show started. Blue Loop are running a 20 seat cyber cafe with just three computers, using some nifty desktop sharing thing on SuSE enterprise with powered USB hubs and 3 or 4 dual head graphics cards per computer. For me, something of the wow factor. Now, what about the chances of ndiyo next year?
The Becta approved learning platform providers are there with varying degrees of prominence. Fronter have clearly invested a lot in their stand space, and interestingly are promoting their product as the "Fronter Open Learning Platform", which, aside from the notion that "Open" is now a selling point in the world of VLEs, led to an interesting conversation with their people. I asked what they meant by "Open".
- Fronter Person #1 explained that it was built with "Open Source Technology", explaining that it was a hosted solution that ran on Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
- Fronter Person #2 went on to say that the scripts themselves were open source. I asked if I could have a copy of them. He said all I had to do was to write to head office and they'd let me have them, but nobody had asked for them yet. I asked what licence they were releasing them under. He said we'd have to ask Fronter Person #3. Fronter Person #2 had been at our presentation. I liked Fronter Person #2.
- Fronter Person #3 said that Fronter Person #2 had got it wrong. The scripts were only available to the paying customers. But if you buy in to the managed, hosted service, you're welcome to a copy of the scripts, which you can modify. I asked about the licence. He looked confused. He didn't think there was a licence.
The blurb says
"Fronter's core philosophy is based on openness. Open source code, standard API, support for industry standards and integration towards administrative systems
Fronter believes in openness and sharing!
Our value lies in the relationship with our customers and in our knowledge of their requirements, not in our source code. That is why Fronter is Open Source."
Anne Fox has some experience of Fronter.
Although these days I should probably be singing the praises of Maxima, I was delighted to see Mathematica at the BETT show for the first time - OK, relatively limited use to a prep school head, but there's enough mathematician left in me to delight in seeing this software in action. Version 6 is promised for the summer, and looks very cool indeed, with a far more interactive interface that will perhaps find it a place in a few more schools. £160 for a teacher's edition.. very tempting... There's also some nice web integration, which could, I think, make it relatively easy to embed mathematica code inside a VLE.
Glutton for punishment that I am, I'm back to the show tomorrow.
Keywords: BETT, Fronter, Mathematica, Moodle, Open Source, Web2.0
Comments
Dear Miles,
My name is Roger Larsen - I am the founder of Fronter.
For clarity, I would like to take this opportunety to explain what we mean with "Open". The expression refer to our philosophy rather than only to the fact that our source code has always been open (not free).
Fronter’s Open Learning Platform means:
· Open Development – Users are directly involved in the development process. Fronter has over five years established a reference group network, consisting of more than 100 educational specialists within five European countries. Each national group meet up to twice a year, and their mandate is to steer the development of Fronter (no user driven ideas are patented, as they belong to the “community”).
· Open Technology – Fronter are built on open source and licensee free technology; Linux, Apache, Mysql and Php. Over years, this has proven to be very reliable and scalable, and today serving 2 million users at Fronter central hosting centre.
· Open Standards – Fronter comply with relevant industry standards for elearning (IMS, Scorm, AICC), and commits to continue implementing standards as they develop. Fronter is thereby Becta approved.
· Open Integration – Fronter is designing component based architecture and standard API in order to make it easy to integrate with other legacy systems. Fronter is currently implementing support for IMS Tools Interoprable Framework and MIT OKI.
· Open Accessibility – Fronter is available for all users, through support for the accessibility standard WAI level AA and support for 12 different languages.
· Open Learning – Fronter is not designed to a partifular learning model, i.e constructivism, but serve as a neutral tool in order to give teachers full freedom.
· Open Environment – Fronter comes with 90 tools, therein a range of tools to facilitate transparant and open learning processes on the web, i.e blog.
· Open Source – …and, the Fronter source code is available to all licensed customers, as it has been since 1998. So, open source - not free source.
· Open Guarantee – Fronter is issuing an unlimited quality guarantee of the product to our customers. Our definition of guarantees goes far beyond what a service provider of a free open source product can offer, as the guarantee also apply to the source code it self! We belive such guarantee is appreciated once a systems become critical for the organisation.
We are strong believers in the open source model - that is why our source code is available for our customers. However, in order to secure constant development and guarantee for our customer we charge for the usage.
Best regards,
Roger Larsen
Thanks for your response Roger.
It's interesting that the blub says "Our value lies in the relationship with our customers and in our knowledge of their requirements, not in our source code." If this is really the case, then why not just go ahead and release the source code under the GPL - the support and hosting revenue stream would surely be maintained and you'd potentially be able to leverage the insight and imagination of far more developers that way, thus securing the constant development we see with Moodle.
If one of your customers wanted to modify the code for their Fronter instance, would they need to host it themselves (not a problem of course, with LAMP as the platform), or would you be able to incorporate the modifications in your hosted service for them? Or are things open to the extent that they have shell/ftp access to the host and can make whatever modifications they want themselves?
The openness of Open Source, as you know, goes far beyond providing the source code to customers: the Open Source Definition is well worth a read.
I couldn't find the Fronter licence terms on your website (which, by the way, doesn't appear to be WAI-AA compliant): I assume that given the openness at the core of your philosophy they are on there somewhere - perhaps you could post the link?
I must say I'm hugely impressed by the notion of "an unlimited quality guarantee of the product to our customers" - we are so used to licences which disclaim any waranty of performance and limit as far as possible the supplier's liability. Well done!
Thanks,
Short answer;
- Unlimited guarantee means that we will immediately repair faults in the software and issue fixes (we do not take responsibility for users actions).
- There are a large number of different open source license terms, including gpl, which are adjusted to fit different needs. We use our own.
- Our business model is based on a combination of license, hosting and services. Since hosting and services are ongoing costs it will not cover the product. As learning platform are business critical for our customers we therefore believe it is in our customers interest that we issue a warranty on the source code and guarantee a stable future development of the product, hence there is a license charge to cover this.
- The source code is available for our customers in case they want to make additions, which some customers do. We do not recommend changing the core code as it will make upgrades impossible and break the guarantee “seal”.
So, there are some limitations to the unlimited nature of the guarantee.
Any chance of that link to the licence terms?
Roger -- everything you describe is very sound business practice, and, at the risk of stating the obvious, it is within your prerogative to conduct business in any manner you see fit.
However, what you describe does not appear to fit within even a broad interpretation of Open Source. Of course, you are free to describe "Open" however you want, but, given the many examples of existing Open Source projects in existence, and the many commonly used licenses within those projects, what you describe as Fronter's business practice still looks pretty dissimilar.
An Open Standard doesn't require open source code. An Open API doesn't require open source code. Your anaphora-like usage of "Open" in your initial response to Miles makes dictionary-definition sense, but means little within the context of Open Source development.
If you read the definition of Open Source that Miles linked to above, you will see the first point: "The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software" -- Can Fronter customers redistribute the code? Obviously, this entire thread is moot without the license terms, and as Miles points out, the link to these terms is not apparent on your site.
Roger -- really, there is nothing wrong with licensing software. As you state, that's a central part of your business model. You are under no obligation to open source your code. You can be a proponent of Open Source without developing Open Source. You can use the open source model to develop code protected by a license. All of this is okay.
But, this still leaves us back where we started: what you describe doesn't sound like an open source project. It sounds like a proprietary software application that runs on open source components.
I give you credit for taking the time to respond, and I hope you don't take any offense at what I lay out. Like Miles, I would be curious to see the license you use to distribute your code, as the terms of the license would go a long way toward answering many of the questions raised in this thread.
Of course, so would a link to a svn repo ;)
But, this still leaves us back where we started: what you describe doesn't sound like an open source project. It sounds like a proprietary software application that runs on open source components.
Have to agree there. Might be a great product and sounds like sound business, but I do not detect anyuthing like "open source" there...
Art Lader
http://www.4germanteachers.com
Just a heads up to folks about what's happening over at Curriki. The site has been adding content and updating tools so that members can develop, publish, and access open source curricula. The new Curriki.org includes something called the Currikulum Builder - it's an editing tool that allows members to develop curriculum materials through a collaborative, wiki-based platform. Here's an interesting lesson that one educator created using the Currikulum Builder:
http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_rmlucas/Stoichiometry
There's lots of great stuff and the more the community uses it, the
better it will be. If you haven't already, check it out.
www.curriki.org