Comment by streamofdigits | Hacker News Reader

Comment by streamofdigits | Hacker News Reader

The paucity of open source LMS likely reflects the uneasy relation of the public sector with open source more broadly. You'd think its a marriage made in heaven: public funds, procurement etc leveraged optimally for common good infrastucture - where that makes sense. But in practice this mode seems entirely marginal. It may be corporate capture, lack of savvy people among decision makers or other factors.

In any case, given the huge upfront investment required for a quality platform this doesn't seem like something an edtech startup can bootstrap. An education platform is not a CMS and its not a social media platform. I think especially now with the pandemic experience it has become very clear how rich, complicated and demanding the educational process actually is. The "archaic UI and features" comment hints maybe at too narrow and technical view. It may be a very relevant aspect (eg if young students puke at the UX it is not of much help). But from an education perspective what matters are not smooth appearances and gimmicks but "educational outcomes".

If you dive into the Dougiamas/Moodle team's thinking you'd see what permeates the design/architecture is to be able to translate the huge body of educator experience and infuse it into software. Somehow we need to move to the next chapter of the book they started writing.

>The paucity of open source LMS likely reflects the uneasy relation of the public sector with open source more broadly. You'd think its a marriage made in heaven: public funds, procurement etc leveraged optimally for common good infrastucture - where that makes sense. But in practice this mode seems entirely marginal. It may be corporate capture, lack of savvy people among decision makers or other factors.

This is interesting. I had the exact same experience working in a major bank. Corporate would usually rather buy anything than "invest" in open source.

Partly it's a question of "support" (getting RHEL instead of CentOS) even though in practice support is often rather poor and distant. More frustrating is when we buy what are clearly simple reskins of OSS with terrible support from eg Oracle. You get all the disadvantages of using OSS (sometimes poor documentation, too many configuration options etc) while also not having code access or control over the platform.

I've come to the conclusion that corporate is sketched out by OSS because there is no one to sue of something goes awry, and that they just don't trust in-house expertise over basically any vendors. To be honest, they are not entirely wrong about the second one: this kind of corporate culture makes good engineers leave.

Maybe its just a phase towards maturity. Functioning / reliable OSS support models are important. "Suing" is just a metaphor for needing reliable partners: running a banking institution or an educational institution or a local government is not a hobby.

But the outsourcing to proprietary vendors mentality might be a far bigger risk. If all you are doing is processing information those vendors will eventually eat your lunch and you will have financed them every step of the way.

> that they just don't trust in-house expertise over basically any vendors.

Another way to look at this: they recognize that they aren't software firms. If you bring in OSS, you have to manage it like a product. You have to recruit, train and manage competent developers. You have to balance competing priorities from "customers" across the firm. That's hard for firms that focus on software, and often impossible for big enterprises.

There's also a cost distribution problem. If you buy commercial software, probably other people are buying it to. Thus you share the development and maintenance costs. You can (hopefully) competent software management too.

I think "open core" is probably best balance here. Yes, we need better funding/pricing models here.

> there is no one to sue of something goes awry

Hum... There's no way to sue any commercial software distributor, it doesn't matter if it's proprietary.

This is the correct answer for sure. I managed an LMS department for years and you nailed it.

I'd also like to add that most education IT departments tend not to have many people capable of building or maintaining something as complex as an LMS. That means you'd need to hire at least a couple new software devs at software dev salaries and software dev benefits to keep them...which ends up costing MORE per year than it costs to shove 99% of the problem off onto Blackboard support and remove a large source of risk while saving money.

this does not address the OSS / proprietary choice though. e.g., there are companies providing support for Moodle. it is service that must be paid somehow, whether through internal staff, external partners or a proprietary software vendor as an additional offering.

The mystery is why they wouldn't amortize the development costs of the platform across the vast number of institutions, creating an ecosystem where smaller edtechs could provide niche customizations via plugins etc.

> In any case, given the huge upfront investment required for a quality platform this doesn't seem like something an edtech startup can bootstrap.

Exactly, especially if it's supposed to be really generic. I've co-founded 2 ed-tech startups targeting niche areas. In both cases there were dozens of competitors in these niches and some specializing in some sub niches. Those niches are most of the time good enough, usually you can find a mobile or web app for anything.

But as mentioned, working with public or private education orgs brings its own challenges. I expect getting any leads there to take years. It's much easier to target consumers directly.

That said, if anyone came up with a generic open-source LMS, on the long-term it could be quite disruptive because everyone in that area is just constantly reinventing the wheel. It's just a ton of incompatible solutions.

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