For those of you who aren’t familiar with Sakai, it’s a an open source collaboration and learning environment (CLE) geared for higher education. The origins of the project come from the University of Michigan and Indiana University, but now involves over 70 schools around the world.

Well now it looks like IBM has become a corporate sponsor of the project. While I always have mixed feelings about a large corporate entity coming in to support open products, institutions that have been resisting the adoption of open products such as Sakai may be able to reconsider.

And IBM has a few nice things to say about open source software:
“IBM believes the open-source movement is leading to the next major paradigm shift in the software industry. We think it is important to view the role of open source in the more holistic form of an ‘open approach’ overall. Together, open source, open standards and open architecture form a powerful combination for the creation of the next generation of applications.”

Yea … duh!