How do you balance vendor and community needs? A Sakai case-study
Channel: Open Source in Business
Date: 06/05/2021

Featured speaker: Dr. Charles Severance, University of Michigan - Hosted by Dave Neary

The Sakai project was created in 2004 by a group of universities who collaborated to create an open source learning management system. By 2006, there was a clear need for an entity to coordinate the community working on Sakai, and the Sakai Foundation was born. Our guest this week, Dr. Charles Severance, became the founding Executive Director of the Foundation, having worked on the project as Chief Architect since its creation.

Affectionately known as Dr. Chuck, he led the Foundation through those heady early days of growth, competing with large, proprietary incumbents. He documented his experiences running the project and the Foundation in his book, Sakai: Building an Open Source Community.

In this episode, we will explore the difficulties around the commercialization of projects which are created by users of the software without the resources or ability to provide support and services for the project. We will revisit the early days of Sakai, the differing interests that come into play when structuring a commercial market around a project, and the lessons that can be learned from Dr. Chuck’s experience with Sakai.

* "Sakai: Building an Open Source Community": https://www.dr-chuck.com/sakai-book/