On Monday 05 November 2007 12:22:01 Brad Bendily wrote: > On 11/5/07, Fernando Vilas <fvilas at iname.com> wrote: > > On Monday 05 November 2007 11:36:40 Shannon Roddy wrote: > > > On 11/4/07, willhill <williamhill2 at cox.net> wrote: > > > > $350,000/ year of Free Beer. An understanding of Freedom can't be > > > > far away. > > > > > > While most people's understanding is a bit different than yours, I can > > > only hope that the universities that are using it "for free" will kick > > > back some developer time or some support to the project. > > > > > > -Shannon > > > > I'm thinking that the first time they run into minor trouble, they will > > call the company that manages Moodle for help. Then they will likely pay > > for a small support contract to get their fixes done more quickly. It is > > still a good thing for those involved, since there are usually varying > > levels of support contracts, and they are probably much cheaper than > > 350K/yr and the developers get paid to keep things going. > > And that's how blackboard got started, then built up to start screwing > everyone out of that > 350K/yr... > strange how the cycle works eh? >
Yeah, but as Karthik mentioned, the nice thing about open source is that there can be many companies that offer support, so you can switch if you need. His idea of a Louisiana Moodle group is great, and could save the various state institutions loads of cash in support contracts if they do it right. To my knowledge, Blackboard was never open source. If LSU had switched to yet another closed source solution, you would be correct, the cycle would definitely continue. -- Thanks, Fernando Vilas fvilas at iname.com -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. Url : http://mail.brlug.net/pipermail/general_brlug.net/attachments/20071105/c0901a62/attachment.bin
