Educational Community License

Sakai is distributed as free and open source software. Access to this code is extremely valuable to those who want to customize their on-campus instance or wish to develop innovative new tools. However, open source code is important to the entire Sakai community. The ability to make that one change to the code for your campus can be crucially important, and that change can be added to the Sakai code base, removing the need for customization as you upgrade. In addition, the source code serves as the ultimate insurance policy, ensuring that you aren't locked into a single vendor.

Sakai uses the Educational Community License (ECL), a minor variant of the Apache License. This license is commercial friendly because it allows the Sakai code to be extended and bundled with proprietary code and re-distributed — it allows the use of the source code for the development of proprietary software as well as free and open source software (of course, the original Sakai code in any such commercial re-distribution remains free and open source). This distinguishes Sakai from the open source projects that use the GPL license, which require that any released extensions to the software should also be free and open source. In part, because of this license, Sakai has attracted a variety of well-known commercial partners, small and large, including IBM and Oracle. This growing network of Sakai Commercial Affiliates is an important part of the Sakai ecosystem, providing institutions with a range of choices as to how Sakai software is supported.