is to protect the institution’s interest, and they found it
hard to see that giving up their ownership rights to code
their people were creating was a good idea. However,
eventually they all agreed to approve the Educational
Community License agreement.
Patent issues have become a serious problem for
Sakai. The dominant firm in the classroom management
systems arena is Blackboard, Inc. The U.S. Patent Office
has granted Blackboard a comprehensive patent for class-
room management software, and Blackboard sued a small
competitor, Desire2Learn, for breach of this patent.
Desire2Learn lost the case, and Blackboard was awarded
$3,300,000 in damages. However, upon appeal most of the
Blackboard patent was invalidated and the damage award
was revoked, but litigation continues. Blackboard has
asserted that it has no plans to sue Sakai, but it could in the
future. In the meantime Blackboard is using the patent
issue to discourage institutions from adopting its competi-
tors’ classroom management systems.
Consequently, Kuali took great pains to make sure
that the developers of Kuali Financials do not inadver-
tently violate any software patents. According to Walsh:
Financial people tend to be conservative, so we are
doing a lot more due diligence than we might have
done otherwise. We had done the due diligence of
getting contributor license agreements with every-
body that had contributed software from the school
saying “I’m not plagiarizing. What I am contributing
is my stuff. I am using all the open-source constructs
that you have asked me to use,” etc., etc.
That might have been sufficient, but because
we are conservative financial people we are going
the extra mile here. We are doing it in two ways. We
are having a company look at the code and analyze it
very carefully for potential patent violations. We are
also paying a software company to run the software
through their system that is similar to plagiarism
detection systems and is designed to identify blocks
of code that are similar to existing blocks in their
extensive database of existing software and thus
might be patent violations. We could do one or the
other of these, but we chose to do both.Why Open Source?
Open-source software has emerged as a new force in the
marketplace in recent years with the appearance of such well-
known products as UNIX, Linux, MySQL, Ingres, Apache,
Sendmail, and so on, which were developed as collaborative
efforts by geographically dispersed programmers working on
their own time to create and/or improve the product, which
458 Part III • Acquiring Information Systems
was made freely available to all within the technological
community. Many people assume that the meaning of the
term “open source” refers to how the software was created,
but the term is generally understood today to relate to the
conditions under which the software can be used (i.e., that it
can be used freely by all without compensation as in the
Educational Community License mentioned previously).
From the perspective of the organization acquiring it,
open-source software would present impressive advan-
tages even if it were not free. Wheeler explains some of the
advantages of open source:If you install software from a typical vendor you do
not get the source code and you do not have the right to
change the program. You can usually make some add-
ons, but no fundamental changes in the system. With
open source, if there are things that you don’t like you
can change them to tailor the system to your needs.
If you install an ERP from PeopleSoft or SAP
you are at the mercy of the vendor. For example, the
vendor decides when to issue a new release and what
that release contains. You have to march lockstep in
order to upgrade, and these are all multimillion dollar
upgrades. You just don’t have control of your destiny.
With open source you are free. If you don’t like what
is going on you can take the software and walk away.
You will have to take care of maintaining the soft-
ware, but you are free to go your own way. So this
model fits us very well. We maintain control of des-
tiny. Everybody has walkaway rights to the software.
The open-source model allows institutions to
decouple producing the software from maintaining the
software. In the traditional model you have to buy your
maintenance from the intellectual property owner
which is a monopoly situation and thus prices are high.
But in the new model we can separate producing the
software from maintenance and integration services,
help desk services, etc. If you hire an implementation
partner to install and support Kuali Financials and you
work with them for two years, and then for some reason
you get upset with them or their prices become too
high, you can throw them off campus and go hire some-
body else to come in and provide your support services.
Finally, even if you don’t choose to install an
open-source software package you still benefit
because the existence of the open-source alternative
provides competition to the traditional software
providers and that competition holds down the price
you pay for the system you choose to use.It is easy to see why the Kuali partner institutions
would want to share open-source rights to the software