Friday, August 30, 2002

Jones Knowledge Will Give Away Its Course-Management Software By FLORENCE OLSEN Jones Knowledge Inc. announced on Thursday that it intends to give away the source code to its now-proprietary course management system, e-education. Details of how the software would be made freely available to developers have not been worked out, company officials acknowledged. They said the transfer would take place by the end of the year. Heather O'Mara, president of Jones Knowledge, said the company was shutting down the software side of its business to leave more time for focusing on its primary interests, among them Jones International University and the Jones e-global library. Jones Knowledge has 125 institutions, including 100 colleges, using its e-education course management platform, for which institutions pay the company $75 per student per course, according to Ms. O'Mara. The software was designed to run on the company's own servers and to handle a large volume of transactions. The company's chairman told The Denver Post that he had spent $35-million developing the software. The company will be giving away an older version of the software rather than the current version, which contains some code from other companies, Ms. O'Mara said. "Having a product that's freely available will be very important, certainly to developing countries," said Janet K. Poley, president and chief executive of the American Distance Education Consortium. Ms. Poley said her only concern was with who would maintain the open-source software. "If this is going in the direction of the Linux movement and is complementary to that," Ms. Poley said, "then I think it's great." Others in the software industry were skeptical of the giveaway. Oakleigh Thorne, chairman and chief executive of eCollege, a Denver-based company that sells course-management software services for colleges, said the free source code "is not going to be of much use" to institutions. "It's going to be unsupported source code -- very hard to get running and very hard to keep running." In a lengthy statement issued on Thursday, Glenn R. Jones, chairman and chief executive of Jones Knowledge, said that "the democratization of education via the Internet has always been our primary goal." The statement said that goal had been impeded "by confusion over which platform should manage educational content and the ever-increasing cost of the various platforms available." Mr. Jones concluded his statement by saying that "the world needs an operating system for educators that is free in order to optimize the adoption and growth of online education." The e-education course platform is written in PHP, an Internet-based scripting language, and it works with the Sun Solaris operating system and MySQL, an open-source relational database. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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