Many of the issues mentioned in that post are the reasons I've rested
on Jetspeed as opposed to some of the other open source portals.
I'll highlight 2 of them:
1) Code "Creativity" or lack of standards. Apache projects seem to
do pretty good at keeping to standards. Apache promotes the
production-quality value of its software so it tends to suffer less
from this problem I think. However, in fairness, I think JBoss does
pretty good with this too.
Interestingly, I've found that Jetspeed does not necessarily use the
same standards as I do :-) So I'm battling with whether to learn
Velocity or try to introduce more JSP examples into J2. For now,
I'll probably learn velocity just for the reasons mentioned in that
post. I don't want to roll my own version of everything. Would
probably be better to just stick with what's already being done.
2) Documentation. To me, the disadvantage of some of the other open
source portals is that they produce terse doc so you will purchase
support. I like the apache way because what you see is what there
is. Everything is very transparent. If there's not enough doc it's
because none of us have written it, not because we're trying to hold
something back. Hey, I was able to get up and running with J2 and
Graffito using the doc and some help from this list. Once the
release is out, it may be even easier than that.
Greg
On Nov 30, 2005, at 9:12 AM, Ron Wheeler wrote:
This is a very good discussion of the major issue with open source
projects.
This is the full text of the comments of one of the participants.
It may be a bit late for the official release of Jetspeed-2 but it
is worth considering.
The full article is at *http://www.learningcircuits.org/2005/
oct2005/adkins.htm
*
*
*
*
*
*David Grebow,*/ /*Chief Learning Officer of Comcourse*
I’m not trying to straddle the answer; I really think its Yes and
No. Yes, Open Source LMS platforms are taking the innovative lead.
No, they’re not in the lead as products because there’s more to
‘taking the innovative lead’ than just innovation.
From where I sit, with one foot in the Academic world and the other
in the Corporate, the Open Source coders are leaping ahead of the
proprietary LMS vendors in terms of innovation. But there’s more to
taking the lead than simply piling on innovative features and
functions.
Using Claroline in Europe and Moodle in the United States, two
programs currently leading the LMS Open Source charge, I
consistently hear three major issues that Open Source needs to
overcome in order to really take the lead and beat their
proprietary competitors.
First issue: a case of really bad GUI. Too many Open Source LMS
programs are just too hard to use. From talking with Open Source
developers, the reason seems to be that the real work is in the
coding, and the rest is not important (sound familiar?). In the
proprietary world, GUI is everything. If the user cannot easily and
quickly learn how to navigate around the system, then they will
quit faster than you can press the ‘Esc’ key. Proprietary systems
literally live and die by being part of a user feedback loop. If
the GUI gets in the way and disables the learning process, then
it’s toast. Open Source developers, it seems, cannot see beyond
their code.
Second issue: documentation is usually spotty, and formal training
programs are no better. Open Source LMS projects tend to have a
major problem with providing decent documentation—if you can find
it in the first place. Because there’s no contract that requires
documentation, it’s usually some general guidelines, almost a FAQ,
instead of a carefully written complete manual. And, they’re
written by programmers for programmers. The most common response to
complaints about documentation is "If they can’t understand it,
they’re not ready to install it.” Documentation should always be
written for the user with the assumption that they are simply
trying to learn how to use a program, not add more cool code.
Third issue: Open Source is plagued by the very thing that makes it
great. Creative programming, from many different programmers,
drives the small parts of code that can add up to the great
features and functions of an Open Source LMS. That same LMS also
suffers from an almost endless feature creep, and this time not at
the request of the Customer. They go way over the top because
programmers can program all the innovative features and functions
they can imagine. And as we all know, imagination is endless and
boundless. It ends up so cool that the average user does not know
where to start.
Unlike most proprietary LMS programs that are usually driven by a
small and knowledgeable team, responding to the requirements of
customers gathered from a variety of sources, Open Source LMS
suffers from the “too many cooks” syndrome.
Again, it gets back to the successful innovative product mantra:
It’s not what the LMS program can do (i.e., how innovative it is),
but what it can do for you.
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