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sakaiproject/sakai
Sakai is a freely available, feature-rich technology solution for learning, teaching, research and collaboration. Sakai is an open source software suite developed by a diverse and global adopter community.
Sakai is a full-featured open-source LMS (Learning Management System) used by universities and colleges worldwide. It competes with Canvas and Moodle, offering gradebooks, assignments, forums, wikis, and dozens of other tools in a single deployable Java web application. This is institutional software — it's built for IT departments at higher-ed institutions, not individual developers.
Active maintenance with a clear release train (25.x, 23.x branches in parallel support), which is rare for academic open source. Internationalization is thorough — 18 languages with proper locale files throughout, not bolted on after the fact. The contributor ecosystem is real: 1000+ forks from actual institutions means bug fixes come from people running it in production. Recent move toward Spring repositories (the MIGRATION_GENERIC_DAO_TO_SPRING_REPOSITORY.md doc) shows the codebase is being modernized, not just maintained.
Getting it running requires Tomcat installed from source (explicitly cannot use apt/yum packages), Java 8, and a Maven deploy step — the local dev story is painful compared to any modern framework. The UI layer mixes Velocity templates, JSP, JSF, and Thymeleaf across different tools with no unified approach, making frontend contributions a game of figuring out which templating engine the tool you're editing uses. Stars-to-forks ratio (1217 stars, 1012 forks) suggests the community is institutions forking for local patches rather than individual developers contributing upstream. The README still references Travis CI build badges while the actual CI is GitHub Actions — small thing, but it signals documentation lag.