Sakai: Building an Open Source Community
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Sakai: Building an Open Source Community A Retrospective Diary Version 0.8 Charles Severance Copyright ©2011- All Rights Reserved, Charles Severance. ISBN-13: 978-1494273675 ISBN-10: 1494273675 CreateSpace Title: 4541576 Front Cover Photography: Town Square Photo, Mason MI Back Cover Photography: HJ Seeley Sakaiger Art: www.sakaiger.com Draft 0.0.1 Printing: January 2011, Michigan Library Espresso Book Machine Draft 0.0.2 Printing: March 2011, Michigan Library Espresso Book Machine First Printing (Alpha 0.7.1) : May 2011, Amazon CreateSpace Second Printing (Alpha 0.7.2) : January 2012, Amazon CreateSpace Third Printing : January 2014, Amazon CreateSpace Preface Writing software that supports teaching, learning and collaboration is far more than just a job. Since teaching and learning are some of the most fundamental human activities, we all have a vested interest in teaching and learning software. Discussions about the design of teaching and learning software can evoke passions from virtually everyone involved in the pro- cess. Passions run high and the stakes are high. On most college cam- puses, the software to support teaching and learning (Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai, etc.) is used more often than any other campus software. Student and teacher lives revolve around the software. A significant outage of a course management system in the last few weeks of class is likely to produce howls of anger from students, teachers, and administrators alike. Building an open source product and community around the Sakai Learning Management System was far from a mere technical activity. This book is about that journey of making open source software and deriving and chang- ing the rules as to how we would make that software as we went along. It is about software developers, managers, designers, and end users all dropped into a crucible and put under pressure to make something great and do so in record time. Charles Severance www.dr-chuck.com Ann Arbor, MI, USA May 8, 2011 Charles Severance is a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. About the Book My intention in writing this book is to give a first-person account of the effort and passion that goes into an open source project. I think that society oversimplifies open source as a bunch of altruistic nerds working in their iii iv basements around the world. Open source projects are often as complex, exciting, rich, and stressful as commercial efforts. In some ways, open source is more complex than commercial activities because there are so many moving parts and there is no real “boss” to make final decisions. Decisions are made based on long discussions that search for the group’s consensus position, often with strong passions on all sides. I hope to cap- ture some of the emotion behind the scenes in the Sakai project that was launched in 2004. Many people participated in the leadership of Sakai and they have their own stories. This book presents my story and perspective as chief architect in the project. Others are likely to have different perspectives on the events I describe. You can find errata, links to supporting materials, images, videos, and a full timeline of my involvement in Sakai at: http://www.dr-chuck.com/sakai-book/ You can also find me on Twitter as @drchuck. You can add ’@drchuck’ to a tweet and I will see it. Feel free to send me comments, reviews, typos, factual errors, or any other reaction as you read the book. Since it takes a village to find and fix my mistakes, I need to thank all of the many people who looked at early versions of the book including: Brad Wheeler, Glenn Golden, Seth Theriault, Anthony Whyte, Rob Lowden, Lance Speelmon, Craig Counterman, Lois Brooks, Shoji Kajita, Vivie Sinou, Ian Dolphin, John Norman, Ian Boston, Robert Crouchley, Adrian Fish, RJ (Robert) Allan, Stephen Marquard, David Horwitz, Alan Berg, David Barroso, Alexandre Balleste,´ Joseph Hardin, Susan Hardin, Mark Norton, Greg Gay, Steve Swinsburg, Joel Greenberg, John Williams, Shawn Mehan, Beth Kirschner, John Leasia, Noah Botimer, Jim Eng, David Haines, Gonzalo Silverio, Matthew Jones, Marc Alier, Eva de Lera, Francesc Santanach Delisau, Llu´ıs Vicent, Pablo Casado Arias, Megan May, Tom Finholt, Jan Posten Day, John Fontaine, George Kroner, Erin Knight, Nathan Gandomi, Andrew Krumm, Nicola Monat-Jacobs, Sam Ottenhoff, Scott Siddall, Kazou Yana, Russell Severance, Richard Wiggins, Judy Matthews, and Mary Miles. The book was written on a Macintosh using the “vi” editor and format- ted using LaTeX. Early drafts of the book were printed on the Espresso Book Machine at the University of Michigan Library with help from Terri Geitgy. Contents 1 Before Sakai 1 2 Forming the Sakai Coalition 9 3 The Sakai Project Begins 17 4TheFirstSummerofSakai 29 5 The Big Meeting 37 6 The Little Project That Could 43 7 FrameworkII—TheSequel 47 8 The Devil is in the Details 55 9 Sakai 2.0: A Star is Born 65 10 Lost in Transition 73 11 The Great Beyond 87 12 Finishing on a High Note 103 13 Beyond the Mellon Grant 113 14 To Be or Not to Be 125 15 Onwards, Upwards, and Down Under 131 16 V-Day 147 17 Family “Vacation” Time 153 18 Educational Community License 161 v vi CONTENTS 19 U.S. Patent No. 6,988,138 175 20 The Fall 181 21 The Winter 195 22 The Tipping Point 199 23 After the Fall 211 24 The End of an Era 219 25 Epilogue 223 26 Reflection 229 Chapter 1 Before Sakai I have been developing computer software since the 1970’s. While tech- nology and connectivity have improved greatly since then, in a sense there has been little change in why I love to write software. From the beginning I loved to write software that would surprise and delight the users of that soft- ware. The more people who found the software to be helpful, the happier I was. For someone who was a nearly invisible nerd through high school, it was pretty exciting to have an audience of users that waited anxiously for me to announce the next feature to be developed and released. Finally, I mattered to a bunch of people — even if they did not know who I was. Even if I was not so cool as a person, the software I produced was pretty cool. For those of us close to the emerging Internet and World-Wide-Web between 1985 and 1995, it seemed as though we needed to educate everyone so they could be part of the growing worldwide community connected by the network. In 1994, East Lansing, Michigan was one of the first communities in the country to rollout high speed 10 Megabit per second cable modems. I helped set up the connection between Michigan State University and the TCI Cable network infrastructure. Based on the friendships that were de- veloped during that project, I was asked to co-host a talk show about the Internet with my good friend and fellow Michigan State employee Richard Wiggins. TCI Cable would produce the program with John Liskey as the Executive Producer and Amy Leahey as the Producer and Director. The purpose of the program was to use TCI Cable modems on our show and regularly remind our viewers how much faster our connection was when compared to their measly 56 Kilobit per second telephone-based modems. The Internet:TCI program was produced monthly in East Lansing and tapes were shipped to TCI Cable stations around the country to be aired on their “Local Origination” channel. At its peak, Internet:TCI was aired in about 15 markets including Chicago, San Francisco, and others. The program pre-dated any other technology program airing nationally. We won 1 2 CHAPTER 1. BEFORE SAKAI a number of regional and national awards for programming produced by the cable industry in 1996. Internet:TCI had a brief moment in the sun because by 1996 it was clear that the Internet and World-Wide-Web were big business. Well-financed na- tional programs like TechTV were quickly produced and delivered daily or weekly via satellite. Also in the late 1990’s there was a lot of consolidation and horse-trading in the cable industry. Our show moved from TCI Cable to MediaOne and then to AT&T Cable Television. In each transition, we lost momentum and other programming in the market made a talk show with two middle-aged geeks talking about computer technology pretty much ir- relevant. John Liskey, our long-time executive producer and cheerleader, convinced TechTV to take a look at our audition tape in 2003 to see if we could do a few pieces now and then for one of their programs. But by then even TechTV had decided that smart geeks were no longer relevant in a market increasingly interested in attracting teenagers by doing video game previews. Even though the Internet:TCI program did not result in a television ca- reer for me, it did give me an excellent excuse to interview pretty much anyone in the emerging Internet field. Back in the mid-1990s when things were just getting started, everyone would talk to you. We interviewed Tim Berners-Lee, Richard Stallman, Jeff Bezos, and many others. Since both Rich and I were technologists before we were journalists, our interviews often tried to get the interviewees to look forward into the future and share their visions of where things might go. In one interview with James Wells of the RealAudio (now Real Net- works) company, he posited that someday we would be using the Internet to teach courses using streaming audio and 28 Kilobits per second modems.