| I've thought many times of building one but ended up using something similar to Teachable (for now). I don't even want to mention their name because their service isn't that good and I wouldn't recommend them but moving tens of thousands of folks to a new platform is a big burden for students so the only time I ever plan to make a move is when I release my custom platform. But, as for open sourcing the platform. I think it's tricky because if you're in tech chances are you'll want to build your own custom platform, if you're not into tech you'll use an existing SAAS service or outsource someone to build it for you in which case there's almost a 0% chance it'll end up being open source because the goal there is to hire someone on demand to build and lightly maintain it, not champion an open source project for years to come. Plus the decisions you make when building the platform are super custom based on what you want. Are you going to support the idea of buying multiple packages for 1 course, such as package A and package B at different prices? How will you handle upgrades? What about subscriptions vs single purchases? Can students comment on things? Will it track and remember progress? Will you have searchable captions? What about handling time sensitive discounts? Which payment providers are you going to support? Then there's the whole idea of optimizing the course consumption experience for your audience, for example a tech course could be displayed and have features that are much different than a Yoga course. There's about 100 other questions to ask here and chances are your combination of features isn't going to be the same as someone else so then you end up with limited platforms that try to do everything and create an average at best experience, or you drill down and build a super niche platform that's great for what you want to do but maybe not everyone else. All of this makes it very hard to have a successful open source project IMO. |