The open source launch of Canvas is different from previous open source attempts to get the proprietary Blackboard system out of universities.
Those efforts, like Desire2Learn, Moodle, and Sakai had a community focus or minimal investment. They couldn't scale to a level a state government (say) might call sufficient to make the switch.
That's where Josh Coates, previously known for having made Mozy worth $76 million to EMC, comes in.
Coates did his homework. Rather than do a soft launch through a community, he built a scaled system on his own, winning the Utah Education Network contract and dozens of others before dropping this latest bombshell.
This is the kind of open source announcement that makes serious people sit up and take notice. Hank Greenberg of CNBC and the Chronicle of Higher Education have both weighed-in with favorable stories, something they never did for Blackboard's previous challengers.
What is most impressive here, from an open source standpoint, is that Canvas is being offered under the AGPLv3. The AGPL (Affero GPL) license, like the General Public License on which it is based, places the same sharing obligation on a program's enhancer as on its creator. For an online system, think of it as the GPL on steroids.
This obligation, what I have sometimes called the “fourth freedom” of open source, remains controversial. It's the fault line distinguishing the GPL from other licenses, like the Apache and Mozilla licenses. Google does not use the AGPL (here's a good discussion of the issue on Google Code) – it might require Google to share its “secret source” on search, something it doesn't want to do.
But Coates has gone and done it.
Before you anoint Coates with Richard Stallman's beard, however, this is a corporate effort with a business model. It's a service model, specifically a cloud model. Coates knows that colleges need to make a decision about buying the next version of Blackboard soon, and he's telling them they can switch by simply moving to his data center.
Michael Feldstein, an expert on e-education who blogs at E-Literate, calls the software “feature complete” with a flexible grading system. It is built with Ruby on Rails, and “2011 concepts” of what such software should do. “The current crop of Learning Management Systems (LMSs ) in the market are mostly built on a conception of the LMS from the late 1990′s, with a bunch of stuff bolted on as new ideas came a long,” he writes.
While large projects in the last year have often used an Apache business community model – especially since Sun was bought by Oracle and turned last year – this is strictly a corporate open source model, like Alfresco and other companies launched in the middle of the decade.
This may prove its weakness. In an otherwise loving profile TechCrunch notes with approval that Coates “has a fully operational M18 Hellcat Tank Destroyer in his garage.” (That's it, with him behind the wheel, to the right.) That may look fine in Utah, but not with many college professors.
They're not his audience, however. Coates is aiming Canvas at university CIOs and at state governments, who are now approaching the idea of learning management in a top-down way.
So who's going to stop him?
