13 December 2006

And the winner is...

Ben Werdmuller, one of the 'inventors' of Elgg, is a bit sad: "Alas, Elgg was unsuccessful in its bid to the Andrew W Mellon Foundation Awards for Technology Collaboration, which awarded $650,000 in prizes on Monday. I've got to confess that I'm a little disappointed(..)". I would also have thought that Elgg really should deserve some prize money, but on the other hand to be awarded such a price, certain rules have to be obeyed. Just read the whole post and also the last comment from Christopher J. Mackie, who is Associate Program Officer for the The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The odds are still stack against open source projects. We did go down the route of setting up Elgg.org as a not-for-profile enterprise but the initial fee was $10,000 - not something we could afford. Of course, had Elgg received some money then this would have been possible. However, then we would still not have been eligible - this statement is very worrying:

"That's the reason that software foundations such as Mozilla were ineligible: their core mission is advancing Mozilla software development, so no funds they put toward that goal can truly be considered "voluntary" in the sense we wanted to encourage. "

I guess they consider giving up all your free time not really 'voluntary', ridiculous! So, instead they would rather spend money on developments that will never make it back to the wider community - hardly promoting the open communities they want.

As Martin Dougiamas (from Moodle) said:

"Almost all of that money is actually paying staff at the winning institutions to work on their local implementations (content, system integration, training etc etc). If they develop code as part of that work, you can bet that a very small proportion of it actually goes back in to the Moodle software you can download (most of the time because it simply isn't that useful to anyone else, not because of license issues)."

Exactly.

All quotes can be found here: http://elgg.net/bwerdmuller/weblog/142574.html

6:21 PM, December 13, 2006

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