Thursday Threads: Sakai Reverberations, Ada Initiative Fundraising, Cost of Bandwidth

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Welcome to the latest edition of Thursday Threads. This week's post has a continuation of the commentary about the Kuali Board's decisions from last month. Next, news of a fundraising campaign by the Ada Initiative in support of women in technology fields. Lastly, an article that looks at the relative bulk bandwidth costs around the world.

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Discussion about Sakai's Shift Continues

The Kuali mission continues into its second decade. Technology is evolving to favor cloud-scale software platforms in an era of greater network bandwidth via fast Internet2 connections and shifting economics for higher education. The addition of a Professional Open Source organization that is funded with patient capital from university interests is again an innovation that blends elements to help create options for the success of colleges and universities.

Yet many of the true believers in higher education’s Open Source Community, which seeks to reduce software costs and provide better e-Learning and administrative IT applications for colleges and universities, may feel that they have little reason to celebrate the tenth anniversaries of Sakai, an Open Source Learning Management System and Kuali, a suite of mission critical, Open Source, administrative applications, both of which launched in 2004.  Indeed, for some Open Source evangelists and purists, this was probably a summer marked by major “disturbances in the force” of Open Source

- Kuali Goes For Profits by Kenneth C. Green, 9-Sep-2014, Digital Tweed blog at Inside Higher Ed

The reverberations from the decision by the Kuali Foundation Board to fork the Kuali code to a different open source license and to use Kuali capital reserves to form a for-profit corporation continue to reverberate. (This was covered in last week's DLTJ Thursday Threads and earlier in a separate DLTJ post.) In addition to the two articles above, I would encourage readers to look at Charles Severance's "How to Achieve Vendor Lock-in with a Legit Open Source License – Affero GPL". Kuali is forking its code from using the Educational Community License to the Affero GPL license, which it has the right to do. It also comes with some significant changes, as Kenneth Green points out. There is still more to this story, so expect it to be covered in additional Thursday Threads posts.

Ada Initiative, Supporting Women in Open Technology and Culture, Focuses Library Attention with a Fundraising Campaign

The Ada Initiative has my back. In the past several years they have been a transformative force in the open source software community and in the lives of women I know and care about. To show our support, Andromeda Yelton, Chris Bourg, Mark Matienzo and I have pledged to match up to $5120 of donations to the Ada Initiative made through this link before Tuesday September 16. That seems like a lot of money, right? Well, here’s my story about how the Ada Initiative helped me when I needed it most.

- The Ada Initiative Has My Back, by Bess Sadler, Solvitur Ambulando blog, 9-Sep-2014

The Ada Initiative does a lot to support women in open technology and culture communities; in the library technology community alone, many women have been affected by physical and emotional violence. (See the bottom of the campaign update blog post from Ada Initiative for links to the stories.) I believe it is only decent to enable anyone to participate in our communities without fear for their physical and psychic space, and that our communities are only as strong as they can be when the barriers to participation are low. The Ada Initiative is making a difference, and I'm proud to have supported them with a financial contribution as well as being an ally and a amplifier for the voice of women in technology.

The Relative Cost of Bandwidth Around the World

[caption width="629" align="alignright"] The chart above shows the relative cost of bandwidth assuming a benchmark transit cost of $10/Megabits per second (Mbps) per month (which we know is higher than actual pricing, it’s just a benchmark) in North America and Europe. From CloudFlare[/caption]

Over the last few months, there’s been increased attention on networks and how they interconnect. CloudFlare runs a large network that interconnects with many others around the world. From our vantage point, we have incredible visibility into global network operations. Given our unique situation, we thought it might be useful to explain how networks operate, and the relative costs of Internet connectivity in different parts of the world.

Bandwidth is cheapest in Europe and highest in Australia? Who knew? CloudFlare published this piece showing their costs on most of the world's continents with some interesting thoughts about the role competition has on the cost of bandwidth.