[seul-edu] General Education Online Continues Strong Open Source Commitment

[Michael Viron <mviron@findaschool.org>]

As General Education Online continues to gain popularity and surpasses
quarterly goals, it has generated a lot of interest in the private sector
from some relatively large for-profit, closed source, companies.

General Education Online continues to have a very strong commitment to open
source, as well as to making sure our valuable resource is available to all
visitors with no fees and no irritating banner ads promoting various items
that are contrary to the core GEO tenants.

As Project Manager and Primary Developer for General Education Online, I
continue to handle all questions from companies seeking to make GEO a
for-profit, closed source, implementation.  I continue to say "No" to all
such companies.

Why do I say "No"?  After having worked on General Education Online for
well over 6 years, many while attending school at the University of West
Florida (http://www.uwf.edu), I was, and continue to be, more interested in
the learning aspect of the project than the profitability of the project.
After having learned so much from the open source community, General
Education Online is a way of giving back to the community.

Although GEO is aggravating in some ways (the few hundred questions that we
receive about various educational facilities each year even though we
clearly state that such questions will receive an automated response), it
is also rewarding in others.

GEO continues to be praised by well over a hundred different education
related organizations, including various governmental departments in the
United States, Canada, and worldwide; universities all over the world; and
finally, education magazines, both print and electronic.

Another reason that I remain dedicated to developing General Education
Online as open-source, non-profit, web application software is that many of
the companies that are interested in purchasing GEO outright, would make it
closed source, remove any current GEO developers from future work on the
site, remove the website from the web (for those integrating it with a
piece of closed-source software), and would require that myself and other
GEO participants sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA).

Michael Viron, Project Manager / Primary Developer, General Education Online