I'm en route to Paris for the 9th Sakai conference Saturday morning writing on the plane. Before boarding I ran across an interesting and very relevant post about the French government support for open source.

The post describes a competitiveness cluster in Paris called SYSTEM@TIC PARIS-REGION, that has established a working group on open source (Logiciel Libre) who's goal is to "help structure the open source ecosystem in the Paris area."

Aside from the serendipity of being on my way to Paris for an open source conference when I ran across the post, it touches on something I've been thinking a lot about lately: The sustainability of the Sakai and Kuali open source communities. Specifically I've been thinking about what the ecosystem around these communities will need to look like in order to be sustainable. Stakeholders will want to help architect the new ecosystem and foster it's evolution as they appear to be doing in Paris:

The state played a key role, by providing a framework, the competitiveness cluster, and the funding necessary to catalyze the interest of the actors.

The Sakai and Kuali communities are developing open source enterprise business applications that offer alternatives to what a recent Linux.com article called the "last bastion of the proprietary software giants - [ERP]."

These projects and the ecosystems forming around them are changing fundamental aspects of how software is produced and consumed in education. While we're seeing some great progress, there's substantial inertia to overcome if these efforts are going to produce systemic change. Further, beyond the natural inclination to resist change, there are those who profit from the old regime protecting the status quo with all their might.

Leading colleges and universities like Cambridge, Stanford, UBC, and Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (the location of the upcoming Sakai conference) are investing and working collaboratively to drive these initiatives and overcome the natural inertia. Companies like IBM, Sun, and rSmart are involved as well as foundations like Mellon and Hewlett who have provided a great deal of seed funding for the development of the software. There's a lot of cooperative effort going into these projects from a variety of stakeholders. Still, there's quite a bit of inertia and deliberate protection of the status quo. Programs like the one in Paris will be an important part of the equation.