The change emerged from a higher education international licensing summit in late 2006. As Coppola explained in a blog entry , the Apache license grants broad patent rights to users of the "outbound" open-source code. But some university contributors (the "inbound" code) with large and complex software patent portfolios couldn't agree to such a blanket license. The license modification in effect doesn't promise to adopters patent rights that the contributors can't give. It took almost a year of debate and negotiation for the Open Source Initiative to give its seal of approval, he says. The result is the Educational Community License 2.0, used by both Kuali and Sakai.

The open-source license is already yielding unexpected results. "A lot [of development] has started happening around the edges of Kuali Financials with the infrastructure components: People are implementing them and adding to them," Coppola says.

This work has been organized into a new project, Kuali Rice , which is creating a suite of middleware programs (workflow, messaging, identity management), interfaces and Web services around a service bus. With the Rice components, developers can more easily build and link applications as collections of modular, interconnected services.

Early adopters
The initial release of Kuali Financial was in late 2006, with a more full-blooded release in November 2007. The adoption by Kenya's Swathmore University proved that Kuali could be scaled down to meet the needs of a very small institution, says John Robinson, chairman of rSmart Group, which worked closely with Swathmore. Release 3.0 is due out in December 2008 with modules for accounts receivable and capital assets, and a battery of enhancements.

For Colorado State University, which is phasing in Kuali Financials, it was just in time. CSU had started the long, complex process of updating its financial system, taking months to evaluate the needs of very diverse campuses and draft a request for proposals. But the RFP was shelved with the advent of Kuali. "Kuali offered functions and integration not available anywhere else," says Pat Burns, vice president for IT at the Fort Collins university.

CSU brought in the "Kuali appliance," a brainstorm by rSmart: The Kuali software is preloaded on a Linux server and comes with several days of rSmart consulting help. Schools plug in the server , load in their data, tailor the chart of accounts, and give it a trial run, seeing what fits and what doesn't. If they decided to adopt Kuali, they've already been started on the actual deployment.

"It was simple to implement, to get started and to enter information," CSU's Burns says. "It didn't have a lot of cumbersome complexity." Kuali is driving a major CSU project to refine, simplify, redesign and automate CSU's business processes around financial management and in future administration of research funds and projects.

One key change has been a cultural one: the awareness and fostering of a community around open enterprise applications. "One question we've been getting from our people attending the [regular] Kuali meetings is 'why have not been doing this before as a community,'" Burns says. "It's really a cultural difference. And most people are seeing that difference as a positive thing."