Riina: What is, in your view as CTO of Ionstream Oy/Dicole, the importance of open standards for virtual learning environments and workspaces?

Teemu Arina: Year after year there are these same reoccurring questions from customers who are looking for VLE software for their organisation: does it work with software X? Does it support the file format Y? How about LDAP/XML/single-sign-on/insert-acronym-here?

These questions come down to one word: integration. Very often the customer is not only looking for the best VLE on the market, but a VLE that could be seamlessly integrated with their existing or planned future software topology and information infrastructure. In other words, they are looking for more than just a VLE.

If you go around and ask about the cost and possibility of such an integration from VLE vendors, the answer is most often something in the tune of "impossible", "we do not support that", "difficult", "expensive".

Our modular Open Source Dicole software, built upon open standards by a community of developers all around the world tries to address that need of complex learning organisations. Our promise is to make tailoring, integration and customization of VLE portal software affordable and reverse the usual answers from proprietary vendors by including customization as part of the package.

To refer to what has been discussed a lot in the software world lately, the "commoditization of software", the same thing is in progress for VLE software. Customers are looking for "good enough" integrated modular platforms upon which to build their infowares on, instead of one-size-fits-all or best-tool-for-the-task solutions. Buying should be made easy and future-proof.

The problem is that VLE vendors fail to address the basic needs of these complex organisations. By a complex organisation, I mean that there are variables that enable extended integration needs like a great number of staff or several physical locations. Schools and research centres are only examples.

Riina: You have chosen to work on the open source model, how do you see open standards and interoperability related to that?

Teemu Arina: This reminds me of a conference I attended a while ago. There was one person that was talking a bit about standards, and this person showed that he didn't quite value the Open Source approach. After a while he proposed that instead of standards, we should talk about interoperability.

I then replied by asking "Isn't the Open Source concept the true interoperability standard?" Any system which is open could be integrated and made interoperable because the ingredients to do so are readily available. This goes way beyond hand-crafted protocols and standards which are either too loose to work flawlessly between systems or get extended by proprietary vendors for various reasons, mainly because of the attractiveness of vendor lock-in. He had nothing to add.

From this point of view I see true interoperability as a much wider issue than how it is usually perceived. Interoperability is not achieved merely by standards in XML format, but also through standardisation of usability, user interfaces and software interfaces and achieving compatibility on various other layers like databases, filesystems, operating systems, languages and different cultures. My experience is that many of these are easier to achieve through collaborative network-oriented development where the users are able to participate and vendors are able to do business.

This is necessary, especially when we are creating complex software that requires a wide field of expertise. One of the key factors becomes the ability to extend your pool of talent through a collaborative network-oriented community model. Open Source is not always the way, but one of the better ways to achieve this.

Riina: What are the other important factors of interoperability for you?

Teemu Arina: In addition to interoperability in the software context, metadata has changed the way we think about information and how machines could be equipped with necessary tools to actually get any meaning out of the massive amount of qualitative data.

The idea of semantic web has intrigued me and thinking about the possibilities of it in the context of VLE systems has troubled me for a while.

One concept I came up for our product with a local university was how metadata and data exchanging standards could help in the matter of licensing and copyrights. Every day a massive amount of digital material is produced. Some of it could be useful in the spirit of Open Source for people all around the world.

Our idea is that instantly when a digital work is created the author is questioned in the same non-technical way as Creative Commons questions the user about the license like "Allow commercial use of your work?". The result would be a proposal of licenses both in human-readable and lawyer-readable format. The metadata of the work (in some general format like Dublin Core) is attached with the machine-readable version of the license and the whole thing is stored in XML/RDF format and given a URL location for access.

Imagine this: you have taken a collection of pictures of some lovely creations of nature, say... squirrels. Well, you have no reason to keep them for yourself and you go and publish them in your VLE as described above. Other installations of the VLE all around the world could now connect with your VLE and start exchanging freely licensed material. The metadata helps in searching with a keywords like "small animals, images and licensed as free for non-commercial use". The search would popup among other things your collection of squirrels with the attached metadata of the author.

Now wouldn't that be the true peer-to-peer "contentforge" everyone has been waiting for?

Riina: The famous question about business opportunities of open source, "but how can you make money then"?

Teemu Arina: As a small player like our company, you really can't compete with the big proprietary software giants that are entering the same market by traditional means and prosper. In the spirit of what R. Young, the founder of Redhat, has said, if you play by the rules of a monopoly, you will lose. A great way for a small business to increase possibility of winning is to change the rules of the game to favor your strengths. Open source business model is a great way to play a different game.

As I have reflected, it's all about being able to foresee where the industry is going and positioning yourself by your beliefs and theories into the new emerging markets. Looking back in time for solutions might be a dead end in this case. Many analysts and researches agree that Open Source is not a short-term trend, it is here to stay. The money will be somewhere else than where it has conventionally believed to be.

Many are betting on services, I'm focusing more on something like a car assembly plant: take good pieces and assemble a "good enough" solution, where the brand, speed of delivery and quality of service are the driving forces. Lowering customers Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by introducing a new and more tailored way of acquiring software, or should I say, "infoware"?

Many software applications are moving to the Internet and becoming infoware, where Open Source technology plays an important role as the duct-tape of the Internet. Take for example Google, Amazon and Yahoo. All are built upon Open Source software where the content and service is the key. The question what operating system you are using will become trivial, since more and more applications you use are on the web.

Riina: Ok, as the last question, what are the current trends in the eLearning industry that you work with?

Teemu Arina: Since the early 90's I have been delighted by the opportunity to experience the migration process of the whole software industry towards a process that I, and many others, call the "commoditization of software".

In comparison, a similar shift happened in the computer hardware business when revenues were no longer made in the big, proprietary mainframes, but in the personal computer (PC) market. This lead to the standardisation of the architecture and interfaces and lower cost components, resulting in systems that were "good enough" and affordable for all.

The personal computer became a commodity. Consumers no longer go shopping for the latest and greatest for the highest price, but look after a "good enough" system for daily tasks like browsing the internet and word processing.

This trend of moving towards "commoditization" is very much evident in the learning technology market, which has been growing at a fast pace. Some manifestations of this trend that I have recognised are:

• the standardisation effort on VLE interfaces,
• pressure towards interoperability, and
• hyping of both XML and metadata.

Furthermore, the importance and impact of Open Source in the mainstream, its increased media value and revenue model innovations will change the way we do business, utilise software and learn in the web tomorrow.

Tim O'Reilly from O'Reilly and Associates has lately been talking about the "Open Source Software Paradigm Shift" and identified the same trend. He highlights software as a commodity, network-enabled collaboration and software customizability as some of the key long-term trends that will cause a software paradigm shift. As C. Christensen puts it, this will radically change the place where the attractive profits are made in the software value chain. If you keep looking back at how software business has worked in the past, you probably won't find a good recipe for the future.

Riina: Thank you for this. I suppose your Dicole software products - Dicole, Dicole Mimerdesk and Dicole LMS are available for a peak?

Teemu: Of course, the demos are available upon request on the site at http://www.dicole.com/en/products/product_demo/overview.
Besides, in the very recent future, we are going to release the first source code of Dicole. I think that would put us among the largest learning environments that support widely the use of metadata for the LO and other file transfers.

To find more about Dicole go to:
http://www.dicole.com/en/company/overview/overview

To find out more about "commoditization of software" type "commoditization of software" in Google and hit "go".