I am amazed to discover that Moodle is an open source system, depending on a community to support it rather than a commercial organization.
I’m also amazed that the OU had the courage to decide to use an open source system.
Market-competitiveness and commercial imperatives are supposed to result in the most efficient allocation of resources – so I find it really surprising that the OU’s experience has been that commercial systems were less customizable and inflexible.
The OU’s experience seems to have been that using an Open Source System was cheaper and more flexible, and that Moodle has proved to be robust, with minimal periods of downtime – this would seem to really challenge many current views about the efficiency of the market.
I also can’t understand why this worldwide community of developers and users are happy to offer their services for free.
Is there a requirement for ‘critical mass’ here? IE if a piece of software is big enough in terms of the size of the insitutions using it, then there will be sufficient, altruistic and interested developers around the world who will want to support it.
IE if a smaller institution, like a single school, wanted to adopt an Open Source System, would that work in practice?
[H800 week 21 activity 2]
Hi Patch
ReplyDeleteWe are just installing Moodle in our school. When a piece of open source software is better than commercial rivals then it makes sense. You are right to point out the benefits of a worldwide community of developers. In my limited experience of this, I've found that those who are willing to assist in the Moodle forums are committed generally to open source software and not just Moodle. It is a growing community - might it even render commercial software superfluous one day? It is nice to see software developed by the people who use it. They can therefore develop it exactly the way they ant it. The alternative is capitalism - create a product and then convince people they need it.
I subscribe to your blog by the way - its nice to see so many posts appearing in google reader!
Gavin