Friday Follow Up

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Well, that’s been a busy and chaotic week.

LMS Market Updates

This week we released our LMS Market Analysis report for On EdTech Enterprise subscribers, and we we released the squid and butterfly (the title rejected by Heart) in a public post on the North American Higher Ed LMS Market.

I’ve received several comments and questions on Canvas being included in the Open Source category and would like to clarify.

• The majority of Canvas code is released open source on github with an AGPL-3.0 license. I say “the majority” because there are pieces of Canvas that are crucial for how Instructure deploys Canvas as a SaaS product that are not open source. This is why we clarify in the chart that this is an example of Open Core as described in Wikipedia. “The open-core model is a business model for the monetization of commercially produced open-source software. The open-core model primarily involves offering a "core" or feature-limited version of a software product as free and open-source software, while offering "commercial" versions or add-ons as proprietary software.[1][2]”

• All but a handful of Canvas deployments at colleges and universities are using the commercial SaaS offering. The number truly hosting the open source code in a freely-licensed environment is in the single digits.

• When Instructure released Canvas, the open source availability was important first of all as a form of software escrow when customers weren’t sure if it was safe to go with a startup. Hey, the worst that can happen if we go out of business is that you can deploy the code yourselves.

• The open source release was and is also important in terms of setting a company tone, similar to the full embrace of LTI integrations and customizations within an ecosystem.

• Now that Instructure is fully established in the market, that open source status is less important. But the code remains available.

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