OSS Watch : Highs and Lows of Open Source
In the spirit of yesterday's Dana Blakenhorn comment James Dalziell is not going to be 'pretending' during his presentation about the highs and lows of outsourcing a project. In this case the project is called LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) and it started life as commercial software.
Lecture Notes follow
How many times has open source produced a genuine innovation - that is to say a piece of software which has no commercial equivalent. Suggests that there aren't very many at all.
Extracting the project from the original commercial company took 9 months of negotiations. However at the end of this promised funding vanished leaving a large problem. Interesting that the project was released to beta partners before the code was made available - lots of work to make code available, not just 'putting it out there'. Began with a code snapshot, only released access to the CVS repository later (today in fact)
http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lams/Building+LAMS
* LAMS 2.0 is not yet ready for teachers - just developers. (1.0 is presumably usable for teachers)
* Got a lot of criticism for using the GPL with FUD coming from some big vendors behind closed doors - suggests that this was because there was a product not an R&D effort.
* Governments were keen on the idea, but some failed to deliver on promises of funding
* Other governments did deliver on funding for specific requirements that they wanted (translation)
* Problem with presenting the product at some levels - first you get treated as a dodgy salesman, then you confuse your target further with talk of 'free' software
To get external support you will need to have a good story to tell about sustainability of the project. If you can't answer those questions things will be difficult.
Has had some extraordinary support for things like translations. Once the process was made open there was no shortage of people willing to get started and work on this.
>> Overall this sounds a lot like the normal struggles of starting a company, getting the first big sales and so on. I'm not sure this is a story this audience hears very often though. What might be interesting is the the OS community tend not to see themselves as having to do traditional entrepreneurship / business and it's possibly a little odd for them when that happens. [Martin]
Interesting point that periodic product evaluations weren't as useful as hoped because they were backward focused. Ongoing user feedback was more useful (Release early, Release often?) .