Apereo is a global network, with member institutions on six continents. Apereo actively seek to develop partnerships to further our mission of creating and sustaining software supporting learning, teaching and research. Apereo partnership with sister organisations, the ESUP-Portail consortium in France, and the LAMP Consortium, creates a network of over 150 higher educational institutions and partners. It’s a network where you can share experiences and good practice, learn from the experiences of others, and discover new partners for collaboration. The network helps to support software used in thousands of educational institutions worldwide. Apereo has a growing list of software developed and maintained by Apereo Software Communities. Apereo also offers the place for higher education software projects, new or ongoing, can find help, support and sustenance. Apereo incubation process supports new projects as they chart the path from innovation to sustainability, with communities developing around products such as EDexchange, a transcript exchange solution, and the innovative OnTask student feedback project. A recently graduated project, OpenEQUELLA is a digital repository that provides a single platform to house teaching/learning research, media and library content.
Apereo is made up of a series of overlapping and interlocking software, regional and thematic communities.
Apereo Micro Conference - Government Regulation of Open Source Is Here (Source: https://youtu.be/Nedn2T06auI)
The collaborative development and sharing of software built using open source licensing and community collaboration models is one of the most successful socioeconomic experiments in history. Studies have shown that between 70 and 90% of all software products, services, and applications are open source. Without this model of reuse-based permissionless innovation many aspects of the modern world would simply not exist: the internet, smartphones, and social media are but a few examples.
But with great success comes great responsibility. Responsibility that we have collectively managed to avoid. Until now. Around the world, governments are realizing that there is a global community which is shaping the future that they don’t even influence, never mind control. And a global supply chain of open source software which is simultaneously unmanaged, unregulated, unsecured and critical to economic success.
The days of unconstrained open source innovation are coming to an end. The question is, what comes next? Well-meaning attempts to manage, regulate, and secure the global open source phenomenon run the risk of killing the very thing that made it successful in the first place: the ability to share, study, modify, and freely distribute software with everyone, for any purpose. This talk is going to discuss how we got here, and examine some policy options for the future that will protect open source from being destroyed by its own success.