Deb Balzhiser Morton was preparing for a presentation at an upcoming conference and started an interesting discussion in the Pedagogy group. The following slightly edited excerpt of her questions triggered me to try to clarify some aspects of openness.

I’m presenting at the Computers & Writing conference next week: The theme is open source. I was recently talking to a colleague who is completely against Sakai. I honestly do not know all of his issues and concerns, but I would like to be prepared for responses and those like his at the conference. When I talked to him, he said that he found Sakai to be the least open of open source CMS communities (Sakai, Moodle, Drupal). In part, he says this because of the cost to join.

Here is my response.

Deb,

I would make a couple of observations:

(1) It is common for someone who becomes a “fan” of something – to look for “faults” is other choices to make sure their “choice” is always stays the “best” in their mind. My guess is that your colleague is pro-Drupal and was happy to take a quick look and quickly mis-perceive how Sakai really works. For example, in regards to the notion of “paying for Sakai” – it turns out Drupal also has memberships:

http://association.drupal.org/node/147

Paying to support Drupal is optional – just like paying to support Sakai is optional. Perhaps your colleague read that “membership in Sakai costs $X” and then neglected to notice that membership is not a pre-requisite for use of the software and membership is not required to be part of the developer community. Membership in Sakai gets you in free to Sakai conferences and allows you to vote on the board of Directors and gets your name in a nice list – not much else.

Many open source groups raise funds this way to pay for servers, source code hosting, meetings, etc. Generally because people and organizations love the project enough to dedicate hours of free labor to the project – often they are willing to voluntarily give money as well (particularly companies or organizations).

One of the very interesting aspects of Sakai fund raising is the large number of organizations that voluntarily give money to Sakai that *don’t even run the Sakai software*. Those organizations feel that it is important that Sakai succeeds even if that organization has no immediate plans to use the Sakai software.

(2) I am guessing that your colleague is more of an end-user than an IT professional. Drupal, Moodle, and many other PHP-based applications really appeal to folks who are not part of IT organizations – often these folks dislike/distrust their IT organizations and want to run “their own” server. PHP applications are ideal for these types of folks because the code is simple and easy to modify, configuration is simple, and as long as you just run it for a few users – it is fine to just let it run on some server under your desk or in a department.

Sakai is designed like most applications that IT professionals are used to working with. IT folks tend not to like modifying the core code of a large/complex application – they prefer lots of configuration options and lots of flexible plug-ins so the core code can remain unchanged as one upgrades from release to release. End users who run systems generally just make changes to their code to customize it and then never upgrade.

The problem is that the kind of features that IT folks like (lots of options and plugins for data) seem really daunting when someone just wants to get it up and running under their desk – so many people take a look at Sakai and walk away because it is “not trivially easy to set up and run” like PHP applications. I am not saying that this difficulty of setup is a “good thing” – someday we in Sakai will come up with a simple version of Sakai that just comes up and runs – otherwise people will take a look at us and look no further because the steep learning curve for installation – we know this is an issue and someday we will find the time to work on that (like any open source community priorities depend on who is working on what at any given time).

(3) In regards to “openness” – there are lots of ways to look at openness – I think that Sakai is average or better than average in terms its willingness to admit new folks into the community – if someone wants to contribute – we usually find a way – we have this area called “contrib” that folks can start working in very quickly to establish their credibility. Take a look at this web page to see the folks playing with the Sakai contrib space:

http://www.ohloh.net/projects/4006/contributors

You will see 86 people doing all kinds of stuff ranging from solid production features to little experiments.

Here is a little table showing the number of folks who are working on the core code (the main release) and contrib space (experimental stuff) for each of these projects:

Sakai: 71-core 86-contrib

Moodle: 133-core 96-contrib

Drupal: 19-core 1196-contrib

You can look at the core number as the number of people who have gained enough trust to really impact the released product – in a sense the contrib folks are often “super-fans” who care enough to build an add-on for the rest of the community – but it is never as simple as this. Part of the difference in the above numbers is because the Sakai core and Moodle core are about 1 million lines of code while the Drupal core is about 100,000 lines of code. Moodle and Sakai’s contrib areas are about a million lines of code whereas Drupal’s contrib is three million lines of code.

Pretty much any way you look at this – the communities are almost mirror images of one another – all three of the communities are diverse, healthy and open.

Kind of in summary – what I think that you are seeing is the classic “blind man and the elephant” – folks with limited experience in open source tend to think that these open source projects are somehow *dramatically* different and draw really strong conclusions that generally suggest that whatever they “like” is great – and everything else is not so great.

Once you have done open source for a while – you realize that everyone is just trying to do good things – and that among the experienced people working in the core of these projects there is great respect between the projects and any sense of competition between projects is just enough for us all to strive to for our work to be the best that it can be.