Future Directions

Statement on LAMS Roadmap, Sustainability, Business Model and Intellectual Property

On July 14th, 2004, LAMS will be announcing its plans to make the LAMS software available as open source software under the General Public License (GPL).

The LAMS Roadmap

The LAMS roadmap is as follows: the current period of LAMS beta testing will be completed in October/November of 2004 when the full Version 1 release of LAMS will be announced.

In February 2005, LAMS V1.1 will be released, and at the same time, the open source code for this version will be made freely available to the public under the GPL. This release will also include any open source code developed for Government funded projects.

Finally, an IMS Learning Design V1.0 Level A import and export feature will be developed for LAMS by July 2005.

Sustainability

The long term sustainability of LAMS is based on two strategies.

First, the LAMS Foundation (which is the owner of all LAMS intellectual property) is a not for profit organisation that will source funding for LAMS research and development from governments and charitable foundations to continue the development of LAMS over 2005-2007 (after which time it is anticipated that the developer community will have grown to a point where it will be self-sustaining).

In parallel, LAMS International Pty Ltd is a services company that works in conjunction with the LAMS Foundation which will follow the successful open source services models of companies such as Red Hat Linux, and the dual licensing models of companies such as MySQL. Its objective is to develop a sustainable revenue stream that can assist in funding future development of LAMS.

Both organisations are supported by Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia through the Macquarie E-learning Centre of Excellence (MELCOE) led by Professor James Dalziel.

Intellectual property

The LAMS approach to intellectual property is that all current intellectual property in LAMS is held by the LAMS Foundation, and all future core LAMS intellectual property developed by MELCOE (including project work) is held by the LAMS Foundation. The LAMS Foundation is committed to releasing all core LAMS intellectual property as freely available open source software under the GPL. LAMS International Pty Ltd, on behalf of the LAMS Foundation, has the right to provide non-GPL commercial licenses for LAMS following the MySQL dual licensing model, and to provide commercial licensing revenue back to the LAMS Foundation to support ongoing development of open source LAMS. Developers who are not associated with MELCOE/LAMS who create additions or extensions to the LAMS open source software (once released in February 2005) will retain intellectual property rights in their code, but developers may choose to assign the additions back to the LAMS Foundation if they would rather it be managed as part of the central LAMS codebase.

Authors who use LAMS to create "Learning Activity Sequences" retain intellectual property rights in their sequences.

For further details about LAMS, please contact Professor James Dalziel, james@melcoe.mq.edu.au.