ABSTRACT
In numerous places in this book we have touched upon the open source versus proprietary solution to VLEs, and we will explore this in detail in this chapter. ‘Open source’ can be seen as legal framework for the shared development and use of code, but it is also a set of shared beliefs about how code should be developed and who should own it. Any software can be developed for any purpose under an open source framework and a vast range is currently available. By contrast proprietary software is owned by the software producer and users pay a license fee to use it and crucially they do not have access to the source code (instead they have a compiled version) and so cannot see how the software works, or modify it. The principles of open source software and community have been well documented by Raymond (2001) and Weber (2004). Quoting Raymond, Stamelos et al. summarize it thus:
The most known principles are ‘release early and release often’ and ‘given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow’. These two principles largely define the power of open source: (a) rapid evolution so that many users/ programmers may be given the opportunity to use the new system and modify it, and no time is spent in ‘unnecessary’ management activities; and (b) many programmers working at the same time on the same problem, increasing the probability of its solution.
