BlueSky Proposal

Abstract

BlueSky is an e-learning solution designed to help solve the disparity in availability of qualified education between well-developed cities and poorer regions of China (e.g., countryside of Western China). BlueSky is already deployed to 12 + 5 primary/high schools with positive reviews.

Proposal

We propose to move future development of BlueSky to the Apache Software Foundation in order to build a broader user and developer community. We hope to encourage contributions and use of Bluesky by other developing countries with similar education needs. Currently, the BlueSky system has already been deployed in India supported by IBM in India and we hope that with the help of developers all around the world, the system could become more powerful and functional in education area.

Background

Bluesky is being sponsored in part by IBM and by the Government of the PRC, through funding of a program headed by Prof. Zheng Qing Hua of Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJTU)in Xi'an PRC. The project originated as a tool to help solve the great disparity between access to high quality education between the developed regions in China and the less developed regions. As of today, approx 70% of China's population live in rural, less developed regions of China. Bluesky helps teachers in the developed regions provide instruction to children in these poorer, less developed regions.

BlueSky is developed from RealClass system to an integrated system,which can support both Windows and Linux.It now contains a set of flexible, statible applications for interactive process, such as "Distance Collaboration System", "Integaration of living, recording and vedio-on- demanding, "Access of mobile terminal" and so on, designed by engineers and educators with years of experience in the problem domain, as well as a framework that makes it possible to create new applications that exist with others.

BlueSky was originally created by Qinghua Zheng and Jun Liu in September 2005. The BlueSky development is being done at XJTU-IBM Open Technology and Application Joint Develop Center, more than 20 developers are involved. And it entered incubation on 2008-01-12. Currently, it is on the way to the 4th release.

Rationale

The Blue Sky Distance Collaboration System(BlueSky) Project is an open source cosmic distance collaboration project. By open source distance collaboration software we mean: Open Source Collaboration Player, Open Source Collaboration Recording Tool, Open Source Distance Collaboration System, Open Source Resources Sharing and Management Platform. And BlueSky can be extended in such parts as Video Conference, E-Learning, Remote Assistant and so on. Its official site is at http://incubator.apache.org/bluesky/.

The maintainers of BlueSky interested in joining the Apache Software Foundation for several reasons:

Increase public awareness of BlueSky and of the application of Apache licensing to business application level software. Lately the news is full of companies that are using a dual-license (GPL and commercial) model for enterprise software and BlueSky working with Apache opens an opportunity to strengthen what we feel is a much higher value way of doing things for both contributors and users.
Help the project attract contributors and service providers to attract clients who would feel more comfortable with the licensing coming through a well known and established organization like Apache.

Recent Goals

Release new version of code
Advance the development of the 5th version
Upload documentation available in English. English documentation available here.

Current Status

BlueSky has been on incubation for three years on apache community. We are trying to develop Bluesky project in ASF.

Incubation Status Report
*June 2011

Meritocracy

Community

BlueSky has striven to foster a diverse community that is open to everyone. It is released under a non-reciprocal license to encourage the maximum possible adoption by all potential users and developers. The BlueSky community encourages suggestions and contributions from any potential user and developers. BlueSky dev mailing list:[bluesky-dev@incubator.apache.org]

Core Developers

The BlueSky team primarily consists of XJTU under-graduate and post graduate students. Now the core team is formed by mainly students from XJTU(Xi'an Jiaotong University), but with the progress of the incubation, wo hope that more developers all around the world could join in as developer.

Alignment

Known Risks

Orphaned Products

The initial committers have a long-term interest in use and maintenance of the code. In fact, there is a weekly development summary on this web site: http://www.p12.edu.cn/ (Currently, only available in mainland of China).

Inexperience with Open Source

The developers use a number of other open source projects within BlueSky, and are interested in how best to make open source work with their project.

Homogeneous Developers

Reliance on Salaried Developers

Developers are funded through research grants to XJTU and are not professional corporate software developers.

Relationships with Other Apache Projects

This project has no know connections or alignment with existing ASF projects.

An Excessive Fascination with the Apache Brand

The developers of BlueSky have been quite successful on their own and could continue on that path with no problems at all. They are interested in joining the ASF in order to increase their contacts and visibility in the open source world.

Documentation

Currently, English Document of BlueSky can be found here.----

Initial Source

Once the code base has been vetted for compliance to ASF license standards, it will be donated to the ASG using the CCLA process.

Source and Intellectual Property Submission Plan

to be determined

External Dependencies

currently depends on LGPLed code like ffmpeg some free third-party lib like JRTPlib and Jthread. And it seems the only conflicted code would be related to Glade.

Cryptography

Required Resources

Mailing Lists

bluesky-dev：bluesky-dev@incubator.apache.org

bluesky-commits：bluesky-commits@incubator.apache.org

bluesky-user：bluesky-user@incubator.apache.org

bluesky-private:

Subversion Directory

SVN repository : http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/bluesky/

Issue Tracking

JIRA: http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/BLUESKY

Other Resources

Initial Committers

Bowen Ma
Chen Liu
Weizhan Zhang
Ping Chen
Zhonghan Wu

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