Raleigh, NC
I'm a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University with an intense affection for all things FOSS. I'm particularly interested in leveraging Open Source in the classroom and expanding the commons of freely-licensed educational courseware. I'm a Computer Scientist, so FOSS is obviously a big part of what I'm interested in, but I would particularly like to see Open Source and Libre Culture penetrate the non-technical disciplines, since there's a whole lot more to it than computing!
Authored Comments
This is very awesome! One of my professors develops a CMS called <a href="https://github.com/expertiza/expertiza">Expertiza</a>, and for his class in Object Oriented Systems, many of the class projects give students the option of adding features to or refactoring the codebase for the CMS they use on a daily basis.
One of the biggest advantages to customizing an open-source tool is that the users who are familiar with it already have their workflow in mind. This makes implementing changes easier (since the developers know how the tool behaves) but it also makes deploying them easier (no need for extensive re-training). In my example, students are prime candidates to make changes since they know how their CMS operates from a user's side. In your example, the same is true for the professors who work with their SMS.
This is a wonderful initiative, and I've been wanting to see something like this for old abandonware video games for years now.
I'm disappointed that they chose an <em>No-Derivatives</em> license by default, though. They've got the right idea, but without giving people the freedom to remix and adapt the work, I don't think it goes far enough.
Luckily, rights-holders are given the option to choose different licenses. I wonder how many will actually go for a <em>Share-Alike</em> license.