I went to the OSS2005 conference to present a paper in which we describe the work that we have done on the internal ProGET application (as part of the PFTCR project), a collaborative work environment for researchers at GET, based on libre software. In this paper we also outlined a strategy for contribution when using libre software, but that’s not the point here (no extensive description of ProGET is already really available, but the slides for our paper describe the main items : features and architecture).
At the same conference, a paper about the Edukalibre project attracted my interest, since the tools developped in this project are quite close to what we have or would need in the ProGET platform.
In ProGET we address users being researchers in a higher education school who want to work in a collaborative way with help of a web platform. In Edukalibre, the goal is to allow the development of educational resources in a similar environment. Both project address more or less the same users, then. And both projects are done by teams having a strong competence in libre software (and a commitment to this paradigm).
The features are very similar too : in Edukalibre, the documents repositories are using subversion for revision management and WebDAV (and other protocols/tools) for access to the documents. Whereas ProGET doesn’t yet use version management, we also provide a DAV interface, and subversion indeed was one option we were considering for doing version management in future evolutions. In ProGET we support some levels of confidentiality with respect to who gains access to which parts of the repositories, whereas in Edukalibre, everything is public. And we implement this through LDAP-based auth, when Edukalibre considers using this too for the next evolutions of their tools. Both projects are integrated with other groupware tools : Moodle components for Edukalibre, and PhpGroupware components of ProGET. When in ProGET we don’t recommend any document format, and include a wiki engine, Edukalibre supports mainly OpenOffice and DocBook documents, and enforces their use, and includes automatic conversion tools : both approaches to documents are really complementary.
Whereas what was done in ProGET is mainly internal, and thus not really a libre software project, we would very much like to be able to publish what we have done as libre software as a new version of the old PicoLibre platform.
As a conclusion, both systems are very similar and would probably benefit from collaboration, or at least offer to tools which can inspire each-other. Next step for me will be to test edukalibre 😉