Open Source and URMANT
URMANT has now been successfully running for a year at Rainham Mark Grammar School, I recently had a meeting with the key users of the system to feedback on how it went. The positive comments were quite overwhelming, which highlights the fact that this system is most definitely something other schools will be interested in using. I’ve already had interest from a number of other schools in the area.
So the question then is, do I charge for it? I’ve been paid for part of my development time at RMGS, but it is my project, not the school’s. A lot of time has gone into the project, that would make me quite justified in selling it, but the perhaps more moral side of me keeps thinking something like this should really be an Open Source project.
A number of options present themselves, I could make it open source, but our education system isn’t renowned for its support of the open source movement, in fact fantastic systems like Moodle are discouraged for use in schools by BECTA for not being a profit-making enterprise. The other obvious downside to the open source option is that I’m not directly compensated for the project, which will inevitable discourage me from developing it further. Donations and sponsorship are feasible, but I don’t know how much that would actually lead to.
The other option is to charge, I don’t want to fleece schools for the project (indirectly, my taxes would be paying for it anyway) but I’m sure a one-off fee could be negotiated that entitled schools to the project and subsequent revisions and upgrades. My only concern with this option is that selling a project, rather than giving it away tends to give the client the impression they can rely on the supplier for support. Whilst bug reports and the suchlike would be warmly welcomed, I don’t want to find myself bombarded with requests about how to set up mysql servers, how to run apache and php, etc. Working as a technician in a school I know how many other schools just don’t have the skills to set things like these up, which leads to the outsourcing to corporate entities and rail-roads schools into huge fees for second rate systems (*cough* RM *cough* SIMS )
The other option I’ve been toying with is to host a single meta-URMANT on my own web host. Schools would then pay a yearly subscription to this system. That way, URMANT itself could stay open source (I wouldn’t prevent schools from setting their own URMANT systems up stand alone from mine), but I could still charge for it, as it would be the service that I am charging for. For the schools, this removes the need for their in-house people to be knowledgeable in the services required for URMANT to run. For me, this would mean I would have to maintain this URMANT, and probably for some time to come. I would have to be sure I could guarantee this service, and should anything disastrous happen this could leave me liable, which as a poor student with lots of other things to do wouldn’t be so great.
Well those are my options, and I’m not quite sure where to go from here. Your thoughts are appreciated…