Forum .LRN Q&A: Response to Why not publish .LRN source code used at Universities?

Simon, no doubt there are a lot of people who won't (or can't) open up their CVS repositories. On the other hand, most dotLRN clients (and dotWRK clients when they exist) could. If someone is deriving a commercial edge from the systems they have written and they choose not to release the code that is their decision to make but the truth is the vast majority of internally developed code provides little or no competitive advantage.

It is hard to imagine a place where more money is invested in IT and there are ostensibly more reasons not to share code than in bond trading at investment banks but there have been quite a few initiatives to pool code, the biggest example I am aware of being EJV which intended to build a common infrastructure for managing fixed income securities data and modeling (and which failed but that is an unrelated story). Also, openadaptor http://www.openadaptor.org originally developed by DKW (or whatever it is called now) was open sourced. It is precisely because the banks end up spending so much money on building common infrastructure that factoring out what does not provide competitive advantage and sharing costs is so appealing.

We are all about communities and collaboration and we have a great platform from which to launch such an initiative. We should be helping provide the tools and information to do so. Rather than quoting the old chestnut ("they can't because it's their competitive advantage") we should be encouraging people to think very hard about what they can open up and more importantly what they can contribute back to OpenACS and lauding the people who take the initiative to do something about it.