Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Will Dr. OpenACS survive? Or why I stopped worrying and learned to love the .LRN consortium?

I think there are some issues with making the primary focus for all OpenACS activities be dotLRN. For one thing it's very big and very complicated hence much harder to develop for than simply writing packages on acs-core, it's quite rigid in the site structure which makes it unsuited to things outside the course management/education market.

I personally think the way forward is to take it out of the university and the reason I think that is that the innovative things I think draw people in are not coming from dotLRN. I think things like Lors, the assessment package, etc are important to the success of dotlrn in the "Enterprise Level University Service" market but your run of the mill student just isn't going to care. They are not going to set up a website to run their own little university or deliver learning objects but they might set up a website to run their blog and maybe a photo album and other things, but it might get to the point where OpenACS is really a high-octane alternative to gallery and moveable type at which point I think we would be more attractive to people getting started.