EdX Source Code Released
code.edx.org
code.edx.org
I wrote the open source alternative to major vendors (ETS, Pearson, etc.) that competed in the Hewlett Foundation's ASAP competition last year. I started a company around that technology earlier this year (http://lightsidelabs.com/) and have been eagerly awaiting the release of EdX source code.
(as disclaimer, I wrote some preliminary thoughts on the announcement several weeks ago at http://bit.ly/ZJTt8E which are probably useful for gauging my pre-existing bias)
Looking through this codebase, it's roughly the level of machine learning work that I'd expect from a first-year graduate student; it gets the job done but is really only tailored to the very narrow task of essay grading and doesn't offer much extensibility. My guess is that for that narrow task, it does a pretty good job, but in my experience teachers are rarely satisfied with just getting a machine learning-generated score and nothing else. The frontend API is a nice addition and the Django service around it is sure to be beneficial, but it's not really ready for primetime yet.
I'll be eager to see if they continue to develop it or leave this as their open source contribution and continue on to other flashy announcements.
However, it's AGPL (Affero GPL) which is really quite an onerous license. As far as I understand it AGPL requires you to release your changes at the time you make them rather than at the time you distribute the resulting software. This will have a big impact on how useful the codebase is to anyone else. It'll be interesting to see how and which communities develop around it.
The use of the AGPL will mean that it'll be slightly harder to form companies around edX solutions: there won't be much advantage of hosting/outsourcing companies over regular on-site consulting companies. I'd expect these licensing terms to result in most users (i.e. institutions) having to install and maintain their own solutions on site. As a result, I'd expect it to be more expensive than other existing open source LMS systems.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License,
if you modify the Program, your modified version must
prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely
through a computer network (if your version supports such
interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding
Source of your version by providing access to the
Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge,
through some standard or customary means of facilitating
copying of software.
This significantly blurs the distinction between things that happen inside your organisation and things that happen at the interface of your organisation and the outside world, especially if your organisation is, say, a university and the people "inside" it are your students and you make your LMS based on this code available to them.
The ?GPL software that a universities IT department is currently running is unlikely to be subject to terms such as these and it will cost a lot to put these processes in place and to maintain them. Compared to the GPL, it's quite a hard license to comply with.
Using a production tree as a development tree has many negative aspects. Student will see any compilation error, development bugs, spelling errors, Lorem Ipsum and other "inside" aspect of development. Having the actually code also available at that time might be inconvenient, but it is easily fixed. Don't develop on the production tree. First develop on a development tree and then once done, push to production.
However, if the complaint is that AGPL require that users get source code... well, that's kind of the point of AGPL. It is the singular reason why it was created. If an universities IT department do not want student to have access to the LMS source code, then they need to decide what they least want to do. Spend money on hireing a developer to produce a similar program, spend money on a proprietary program that may or may not do what they want (minus customization), or accept giving student source code so they might read, learn, and maybe even be artistic and improve on. Three things student are sadly rarely allowed to do in universities.
Really? I don't see it.
Compliance should be easy for any site where the source code already resides on the server (e.g. every Ruby on Rails, Node.js, or Python-based site). All you do is you provide an option to download the code that's running on the server. As long as you store secrets outside your source tree (e.g. put HMAC keys into /etc), this should be easy.
[1] As a side note, apparently I'm the #23rd most frequent committer, and I only worked on edX for a couple months, that's pretty cool :)