LM, 28/07/20 13:06: > Is there a Free Software > solution that does the job? If not, how do we expect schools to give > Free options or replace what they're using?
The typical way would be that some large universities identify some common issues they have with the proprietary software, set some priorities and pool their resources to pay someone to develop a free software alternative, ideally integrated in whatever free software they already use (Moodle?). The issue with plagiarism checkers is that they built a monopoly by getting exclusive access to student-made materials. You cannot really expect Turnitin (or even Google) to license you their dataset in order to build a competitor. Sure, you can hope for some antitrust action to force them, but even if you're successful it's going to take 10-20 years, so if you start from scratch you need a significant critical mass either way. On the other hand, a university building its own software knows what sources they really care about checking, and may not need such a giant index. Specific pieces may be outsourced without insurmountable difficulties, for instance there are many web crawling services and a few good indexers of academic content (Microsoft Academic is actually behaving quite well so far! forgive me for the satanic reference). Federico _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
