OLDaily

Blockchain for Education and Professional Development
Hristian Daskalov, SlideShare, Source University, 2018/08/24

This is a slide presentation outlining some aspects of OS.University (Open Source University) ad in particular their development of a distributed blockchain application (dApp) to manage such things as certificate verification and resource distribution. "The OS.University DApp bridges the gap between businesses and education through blockchain [used for validating and verifying learners’ credentials] and smart contracts [managing content purchases and other marketplace transactions, as well as HR processes]." They're still at the proof-of-concept stage and the presentation is pretty high-level but it's a sign of more to come. Via e-learning-teleformacion.

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Reusable content matters: a learning object authoring tool for smart learning environments
Arif Altun, Mehmet Ali Çinici, Smart Learning Objects, 2018/08/24

As the abstract says, this study "reports the design and evaluation process of an authoring tool that is developed for content developers and/or instructors to be able to reuse and repackage existing learning objects (LOs)". The tool is called ONYA (which stands for Learning object authoring tool in Turkish) and was built using Microsoft Visual Studio. Most of the article describes how the evaluation of the tool was conducted; at the end we read that, yes, the tool was satisfactory. I didn't see any notes on the wider availability of the tool, and so regard the evaluation process as the primary content here.

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The Commons Clause
Heather Meeker, GitHub, 2018/08/24

"Modern open source infrastructure software has created more value over the past decade than we could have ever imagined," write the authors at RedisLabs, makers of open source data management software. "However, today’s cloud providers have repeatedly violated this ethos by taking advantage of successful open source projects and repackaging them into competitive, proprietary service offerings." Cloud providers, in particular, don't support the software developers. So they've added what they call a 'Commons Clause' which "maintains all conditions of the underlying open source license, but limits commercial sale of the software."

It's the whole non-commercial license debate all over again, this time applied directly to open source software. And so not surprisingly there's a response. In The Commons Clause will destroy open source Drew DeVault writes "The Commons Clause promoted by Kevin Wang presents one of the greatest existential threats to open source I’ve ever seen." As for Redits, DeVault writes, "Everyone who has contributed to the now-proprietary Redis modules has had their hard work stolen and sold by RedisLabs under a proprietary license." Maybe he's right - but maybe Redis is right too. More from Hacker News, Reddit

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