“Back in February, I wrote about Instructure’s risky move
open-sourcing their Canvas LMS. The product was great, an
easy-to-use, robust LMS with solid social features and a
spectacular user interface. It was highly scalable and suddenly
anybody (or at least anyone with a bit of Ruby on Rails experience)
could fire it up on their own server. The question was, would
anybody pay for Instructure’s hosting and support when they could
host the LMS themselves?“The answer turned out to be an overwhelming yes. As Devin
Knighton, Instructure PR Director told me, ‘Instead of the hundreds
of leads their sales team was expecting from the announcement, we
received thousands.’ See, Oracle? You can make money from open
source!“This much interest, though, obviously meant that Instructure
needed to scale their sales and support teams fast.”