An interesting idea – funds to work on open source projects 4 December, 2003
Mark Shuttleworth (of first private citizen in space fame) is offering money to developers to solve specific problems on open source projects. What a cool idea!
Wouldn’t it be great if this could be extended to learning environments in higher education? If all the universities, rather than giving money in annual ’subscription’ fees to Blackboard and WebCT, put their cash into a pot to fund developers working on an open source learning environment? True, there’s a plethora of open source tools and learning environments available but they are disparate, sporadically updated and immature. A pot of money could really focus development and everyone would benefit. Developers would have an incentive to work on a single, unified project and universities could break their reliance on expensive vendors of what are often shoddy or ill matched products. The universities would be working for each other and students and staff would all profit.
Well I can dream can’t I?