Sakai is relatively young, but has multiple strong roots and has grown fast.
In late 2003, four universities—MIT, Michigan, Stanford, and Indiana—saw a common cause to jointly develop an Open Source Virtual Learning Environment. They agreed to contribute labor to the tune of $4.4 million, and slightly later that year the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (http://mellon.org) seeded another $2.2 million.
The project did not need to start from scratch; the University of Michigan already had a significant code base and, just as importantly, a conceptual framework and essential experience from the creation of its own set of tools called CHEF. The Java-based CHEF tools encompassed a subset of the Sakai functionality and were mature, with first deployments as early as 2001. The original Sakai code base also included code from the other universities (including coursework and assessments from Stanford) and OSIDs (a set of standard coding APIs and architecture for educational purposes based on Service Oriented Architecture) from the OKI project (http://okiproject.org).
The first phase of Sakai was the so-called "best of refactoring", during which the code was unified and the main framework put into place.
The newly formed team officially announced the Sakai project at Educause (http://educause.edu) in November 2003, and in June 2004 the team released Sakai 1.0. Date-driven development cycles resulted in a high evolution rate and both Michigan and Indiana rolled out Sakai to their student and instructor audience at the end of 2004 and during 2005.
For the Sakai project to survive beyond the first two years, it needed to move away from potential grant addiction toward a model in which the community and project were self-sustaining. The vehicle for this transition was the Sakai Foundation, to which, in a fit of good judgment and self-interest, individual organizations transferred copyrights and resources.
A separate project, the Open Source Portfolio (OSP) initiative, was later merged into the code base and it improved both the overall value of Sakai and OSP products by enriching functionality and allowing a combined use of resources for quality assurance and tool building.
Sakai membership costs an organization $5,000 $10,000 per year. The members channel the money to fund the Foundation, which then helps manage the evolution of the software and stimulates the health of the community.
Recognizing early the significant role that commercial support can play in helping academic organizations deploy, the Foundation created its Sakai Commercial Affiliates (SCA) program to foster commercial partnerships.
Currently there is a healthy biosphere with commercial partners providing a variety of support, from hosting to customizations and tool building. Selling Sakai to local management becomes that much easier. For a relatively few bucks, management can buy commercial support of a known quality to support any new deployments or personalizations. There are small start-up companies that specialize in training or turnkey solutions such as Edia (http://edia.nl) and Airplane (http://aeroplanesoftware.com), and large more established players such as rSmart (http://www.rsmart.com) or Unicon (http://aeroplanesoftware.com). Management is not stuck to a choice of one and competition has the strong tendency to lower costs.
The goals of the Foundation include measuring and understanding the needs of the user, sponsoring inter-organizational collaboration, supporting the growth of the community, and keeping decision-making processes as transparent and accessible as possible.