StigmergicWeb

Frontier has been released as an open source project

I’ve just finished listening to Dave Winer’s audio coffee notes from a couple of days ago discussing the release of Frontier under the GPL. Here’s the quick and easy blurb from the Frontier Kernel site:

This is a fresh start for the Frontier kernel, the technology under Manila and Radio UserLand, and in the future, possibly many more useful system and network applications. We’re releasing the code under the GPL, the rationale for this is explained in the FAQ and in the audio blog post I recorded about this event.

I remember playing around with Frontier as a client based content management system a few years ago. The only reason I stopped noodling around was my introduction to Linux, and I’m really excited about this release since it opens up the possibility that Frontier could be ported to Linux.

If you’ve never heard of or worked with Frontier, here’s a description right from the official site:

It’s a high performance Web content management, object database, system-level and Internet scripting environment, including source code editing and debugging.

Incredibly, Dave Winer started developing this in 1989, and the web content management and internet scripting were in the Frontier package before the big public internet boom in 1995. Frontier’s re-birth as an open source package may offer some incredible opportunities for new web application development.

I’ll follow up on Rick’s declaration that today is open source day (in honour of Alec Couros‘ completing comprehensive exams for his Ph.D.).

Today is a good day to be talking about open source. I just read that there is going to be a cross-campus installation of Moodle at Dublin City University (thanks to Scott Leslie at EdTechPost for the link). Whenever I have looked at Moodle, I always wonder why educational institutions continue to license WebCT or Blackboard. I have heard WebCT described as a programmer’s idea of what an online learning environment should be. Moodle is based on a social constructivist pedagogical paradigm, and was written from the ground up to support that framework.

DCU is to be commended for their thoughtful process in selecting a virtual learning environment. They carefully examined their current and projected needs, then looked at what was available that met their needs. Being an advocate of open source software, I am happy they chose an open source package. Part of their reason for choosing Moodle was obviously the cost (free as opposed to US$75 000 for an enterprise wide deployment of WebCT Vista edition), but another advantage they cite is the avoidance of vendor lock-in. Since Moodle is open source (written in PHP), future enhancements to their deployment could be commissioned at very reasonable rates.

Once DCU has deployed Moodle, they should demonstrate quite effectively that open source software can compete with commercial packages in enterprise level deployments.

And Rick, if you are reading this, I promise to get back to work on the project right away! ;^)