The cost of open-source.I appreciated your interesting and well-written article on course management systems and the Sakai Project This page is about the software project, for other meanings, see Sakai. Sakai is a community of academic institutions, commercial organizations and individuals who work together to develop a common Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE). ("New Lessons in Course Management," September). I'm excited about the potential of Sakai to provide a new model for course management systems. However, I'm concerned that the casual reader might make the inference (logic) inference - The logical process by which new facts are derived from known facts by the application of inference rules. See also symbolic inference, type inference. that Sakai, as well as other open-source software projects, are inherently lower-cost than commercial products. For any complex, enterprise software system--a category that certainly includes course management systems today--the costs of installing, upgradinq, and providing end-user support are far greater than the cost of the software license. In many cases, open-source systems require higher levels of in-house technical skill to support, or require contracts with third-party vendors to provide this expertise. So while I think Sakai is a wonderful experiment and I support it, nobody should automatically assume that every IHE IHE Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise IHE Institutions of Higher Education IHE International Institute for Infrastructural, Hydraulic and Environmental Engineering (historical acronym only, replaced by: IHE Delft, the Foundation) will find that Sakai will cost them Less than a comparable commercial product. Time will tell. A. MICHAEL BERMAN Michael Berman may refer to:
Cal Poly Cal Poly may refer to:
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