After the promotion of Open Access (see Bernard Rentier’s blog) and a history of publications in Open Access journals (see this last article from the Cyclotron Research Center in PLoS), the University of Liege is slowly slowly publishing Open Source software too.
The last free software published is exams, an assessment management system (for on-line exams, …). They chose the GNU GPL 2, apparently without the possibility to upgrade to version 3 (I don’t know if it’s deliberate or not). And you can download the source code here.
What is even more interesting is that they provide a demonstration website if you want to test it in a nearly real setup (as examiners or students ; only in French). And the demonstration system is hosted by a commercial hosting company (OVH), indicating that it could be possible to use this system on very common platforms (only PHP/MySQL are required).
Now, we can dream of other software from the ULg released as free software, a subversion repository and a users/developers community around exams …
P.S.: of course, we already did all that š since we published Gemvid in an Open Access journal (the Journal of Circadian Rhythms) and published it along with a lot of other tools as free software. But I don’t count this as an institutional push towards free software since it was mainly my decision and the development didn’t involved other people.
Could be very nice and attractive this idea of SVN and community around this product ….
Well I prefer Ruby so …