EdX Source Code Released

cool it's using django! wait a sec... rake django-admin[syncdb] ???

Here are my quick, shallow thoughts on this release.

I wrote the open source alternative to major vendors (ETS, Pearson, etc.) that competed in the Hewlett Foundation's ASAP competition last year. I started a company around that technology earlier this year (http://lightsidelabs.com/) and have been eagerly awaiting the release of EdX source code.

(as disclaimer, I wrote some preliminary thoughts on the announcement several weeks ago at http://bit.ly/ZJTt8E which are probably useful for gauging my pre-existing bias)

Looking through this codebase, it's roughly the level of machine learning work that I'd expect from a first-year graduate student; it gets the job done but is really only tailored to the very narrow task of essay grading and doesn't offer much extensibility. My guess is that for that narrow task, it does a pretty good job, but in my experience teachers are rarely satisfied with just getting a machine learning-generated score and nothing else. The frontend API is a nice addition and the Django service around it is sure to be beneficial, but it's not really ready for primetime yet.

I'll be eager to see if they continue to develop it or leave this as their open source contribution and continue on to other flashy announcements.

As someone who contributed a bit to edX last year[1], it seems that they found rake to be a nicer way to encapsulate scripts than, for some reason, shell scripts or something. IIRC it was just setting some environment variables to manage the dev environment. Personally I would have wished that they used Rails instead of Django but this bit of oddity was kind of amusing for me.

[1] As a side note, apparently I'm the #23rd most frequent committer, and I only worked on edX for a couple months, that's pretty cool :)

I was actually referring to https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/graphs/contributors , didn't check the Authors file. It's very cool to have been a part of this.

That't a very stranger interpretation of the license. Here is the complete license text minus the GPLv3 itself (which explicitly do not include Remote Network Interaction):

  Notwithstanding any other provision of this License,
  if you modify the Program, your modified version must 
  prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely 
  through a computer network (if your version supports such
  interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding 
  Source of your version by providing access to the 
  Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, 
  through some standard or customary means of facilitating 
  copying of software. 

Is it really that hard to read/interpret? It seems to me as very simple. If you use AGPL software and provide a service to users, and you have modified the software, then those users after accessing your service has a right to access the source code. If you don't modify it, or do not let users interact with the service, then you can happy ignore the (A)GPL part of the license and treat it as GPL.