Basil Kurian - Wed, 2010/08/11 - 08:32

http://www.efrontlearning.net/

 

admin username : admin

admin password : admin

 

base : Turnkey LAMP Hardy or Turnkey LAMP Lucid

Forum: 
General
Tags: 
tklpatch
Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Wed, 2010/08/11 - 11:51

Unless there is a licencing issue, why not have the patch download it (eg using wget)?

Liraz Siri's picture

Liraz Siri - Wed, 2010/08/11 - 12:16
Including a command that wgets the package in the tklpatch is not a bad idea at all.

Note that the community version of eFront seems to be distributed under the Common Public Attribution License, an open source license which allows redistribution and modification. And if you can't redistribute it's not open source, so we couldn't include it in the TKL anyway...

Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Wed, 2010/08/11 - 12:50

I probably could've had a read and checked the licence myself but i was being lazy. If it had not have been for the Qmail discussion it probably never would've even occurred to me that it would've been an issue.

Basil Kurian - Wed, 2010/08/11 - 13:14

It is difficult to get a direct link in the case of some applications hosted in sorceforge. In such i cases wget <url> will not work.

The other option is to put the packages in overlay and there is no meaning in attatching such a big file here.

So I added them in the instructions. Hope you understand what I mean .

Liraz Siri's picture

Liraz Siri - Mon, 2010/08/23 - 03:32
It can be a bit tricky but you can get a direct link for files hosted on sourceforge. Just copy the URL from the direct link and remove all the junk after the filename.

I verified that this works: 

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/efrontlearning/efrontlearning/eFront%20v3.6.5/efront_3.6.5_build8087.zip

Basil Kurian - Wed, 2010/08/11 - 13:21

:)

Liraz Siri's picture

Liraz Siri - Mon, 2010/08/23 - 03:33
Good!
Liraz Siri's picture

Liraz Siri - Mon, 2010/08/23 - 03:38
On one hand it looks like a nice application. On the other hand, it's one of those commercial "open source" applications where the community version has been significantly crippled to prevent competing with the commercial version.

I realize this makes it easier for the company developing the software to make a living but conflicts of interest like this inhibit a real open source community from forming around their project. It's a short sighted strategy.

The public attribution license is not so good as well. Similar to what SugarCRM used before they switched to the AGPL.

Nektarios's picture

Nektarios - Thu, 2010/08/26 - 19:39

Sugar CRM used its own proprietary license. On the other hand CPAL (used bu eFront) is an open-source license accepted from OSI (the open source initiative): http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cpal_1.0

The discussion between total open-source software over different commercial forks is still in its infrantry. However, even truly open-source companies at the end end-up selling some sort of premium software (e.g, Redhat). Its hard to make a living only through services - it is how you treat your users and customers that diferentiate you.

Try the free version of eFront - it is much better than Moodle or Dokeos or Atutor or most other alternatives.

Liraz Siri's picture

Liraz Siri - Mon, 2010/09/20 - 03:53
Thanks for the feedback regarding eFront. I agree that an OSI accepted license is substantially better than a weird custom license.

I didn't realize RedHat had any truly proprietary offerings on the table. Could you give a few examples?

From what I understood RedHat products contain only open source components. The for-pay stuff you can't get access to from an open source alternative (e.g., CentOS) is the premium support offerings such as the Red Hat Network from which you get security updates and such.

SL's picture

SL - Wed, 2010/09/22 - 11:28

From what I've heard is that the Enterprise Distribution of RHEL contains a number of components which are not open-sourced and thus not included within CentOS (which is compiled from the source code of RHEL). The reason for this is that RHEL didn't develop those components and thus does not have the rights to release them with the source code (though they may be free to distribute). The CentOS community has dealt with this in different ways, usually by obtaining the same component OR utilizing an equivalent open-source component.

So even without the branding removal, CentOS and RHEL are not perfectly the same 1 to 1.

But back on the original topic:

I've used Efront, the OS version is really nice and contains a lot of features. But you are correct in saying that it is not open-source in spirit, as they do hold back a number of features for their paid for model. I believe this is a different situation from RHEL, who only holds back components they do not own.

But the Efront situation is very similar to the current model being used by Mindtouch with their Core, Enterprise 10 and 2010 product line. I love Mindtouch, but the latest OS version annoys me a bit. For "was this page helpful button" appears prominently in the OS version, but leads to a message encouraging the upgrade to their paid-for 2010 version to access the curation feature.

Liraz Siri's picture

Liraz Siri - Thu, 2010/09/23 - 04:25
Thanks for enlightening me regarding the situation with RHEL. If you know what specific components are in RHEL that are proprietary I'd be interested in learning more!

Regarding MindTouch, if open source software has anti-features designed only to encourage users to upgrade to the proprietary version we could just apply a patch to disable them. I'm not sure this is the right approach but anti-features bug me. Vendors are free to choose how much of their code they want to release under a free license, but should remember that anything under that license is free game for modification.

olc's picture

olc - Thu, 2011/02/03 - 05:14

eFront looks pretty much like a rip-off Dokeos or CHamilo.

Nektarios's picture

Nektarios - Thu, 2011/02/03 - 15:40

Obviously you have not used all three systems because your comment can't be further from reality.

No matter if you prefer eFront or Dokeos they are totally different systems with unique history and characteristics.

A simple web search (or digging on their source) can reveal that this is the case indeed.

On the other hand Chamilo was based on Dokeos source at its initial steps.

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