Any thoughts on this and how it will affect the Open edX community? Any risk of edX pulling the source code at some point?
We had a contributors meeting yesterday where we discussed this. No one in the room seemed to have much more information than what’s in the blog post – even edX employees learned about the news at the same time. The reason for this secrecy is that 2U is a publicly traded company and the risk of insider trading is real.
With that caveat, we all agreed that this is tremendously good news. edX has always been this conflicted company that produced open source software but that really cared about the edX.org website. A few people inside edX are involved in the open source community but the rest of the company is only faintly aware that there are other people out there running Open edX.
With this acquisition, edX is being split in two separate entities, including a non profit that will care exclusively about the development of Open edX, while the development of edX.org is moved to 2U. And this non profit will kick-start with an initial funding of $800M. This is a complete game changer. All of a sudden, we have a unicorn company dedicated to the development of the open source aspect of the project.
For a clearer perspective, I encourage everyone to read this article by the president of MIT: A new future for edX | MIT Office of the President
I find it much clearer than the actual press release.
EDIT: here is the recording of our contributors meeting Open edX Contributors Meetup - #65 by arbrandes - Working Groups - Open edX discussions
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Interesting article 2U + edX Analysis: Win for 2U, Risk for edX, Opportunity for Coursera — Class Central
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