[sakai2-tcc] What does Blackboard want from this arrangement?

[csev]

I was asked offline what Blackboard wants from this arrangement (i.e. Dr. Chuck's hours, money, etc).  It is a fair question.

In the infinitesimally short term - they already have what they wanted.  Me advising them on a host of things Sakai and otherwise and a press release saying so.   I said that if they wanted me, I needed to have resources for my first loves - CLE 2.9 and the TCC.  Yes - I now "You only hurt the ones you love."  There would be no strings attached because I needed to take the advice of the TCC before I did anything or I would be violating my own rules - which I will not do.

In the short term - they want to be an SCA and understand that to be an SCA there must be a contribution to the Sakai community.  They are coming late to the party and so my recommendation is to make the contributions open, clear, direct, impact and subject to the guidance I receive from the TCC.

In the medium term - Blackboard wants to build skill in Sakai technology amongst the Blackboard staff.  So when I (or we) help them do QA, they  come up to speed - or if they do performance testing, it might inform a possible future hosting offering.  The "string" on this one is that if this time next year I have hired a Blackboard staff member that is helping the TCC with the community edition and running a production Sakai back at the shop, there is benefit in shared QA of code that will soon run in production on Blackboard servers (this last bit is just a hypothetical right now).  This is no different than rSmart, Unicon, or LongSight as members of the TCC.  Working with the TCC has great cost-benefit for those that want to stay near trunk.

In the long term - I think that this is an IBM-like move where part of a commercial company's strategy is to insure that open source ecosystems thrive in the marketplace to insure their own survival.   Like the WebSphere/Apache relationship.  Having a really good open source reference implementation is an indication of market maturity.  As someone else said to in email to me, it is take a bit of money from the products that produce plenty of revenue and spreading it around to the open source players to keep the market healthy.   It is a relatively small investment with a lot of payoff in the form of a healthy marketplace.

In he who-the-heck-knows term - I hope to take it even a bit further if things work out and see if I can produce a healthy model for Sakai sustainability without compromising TCC authority that is different from anything the market has yet seen.  

To be clear - I did not find a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.  I have *some* money and resources that I can invest as *I* see fit.  I only have enough to fill critical gaps.  All of you are still completely essential.  Remember - this is me we are talking about.  Without you telling me what to do, I will increase velocity and immediately hit a bridge abutment and it will all be wasted.  I am good at increasing velocity - not so good at knowing what to do.  Kind of like a 16-year old that just got their driver's license.

/Chuck