As many of you have read, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has merged its Research in Information Technology (RIT) program into the Scholarly Communications program (to be renamed) led by program officer Don Waters. This change at the Mellon Foundation has prompted some questions and considerable misinformation regarding its effect on Kuali Projects. Thus, the Foundation Board wishes to convey the following points:

1. Higher Education would have been considerably slower in learning how to pool our resources, synchronize our needs, and develop enterprise-grade software without the timely investments of the Mellon Foundation during the RIT program’s ten years. The Mellon brand and seed capital – always a minor investor relative to the scale of institutional investments – was catalytic in creating the Community Source model of institutional investment and commercial support. For this, the many participants in Kuali projects are deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation and the work of Ira Fuchs, Chris Mackie, Don Waters, and others over the years.
2. Every Kuali project was chartered to be fully self-sustaining without reliance on further investment from any foundation. That remains true today.
3. By example, the Kuali Financial System finished its 2005 Mellon grant in 2008. KFS Release 3 was completed by member investments, and KFS is now operating under its sustaining charter and investing members. Kuali Rice has always and only been member funded.
4. All existing Mellon grants to the development stages of Kuali Student, Kuali Coeus, and Kuali Open Library Environment will continue without change in cooperation with the expanded portfolio of Don Waters. Don funded the 2005 Licensing and Policy Summit that architected the licensing and contributor agreements now used by many community source projects including Kuali.
5. Consistent with the Mellon Foundation’s priorities and recent grants, we anticipate that there will be other IT-related opportunities that focus on the core issues of research, education, and scholarly communications in the future.

Foundations strategically target their investments to areas where their role can be transformative rather than create needs for unending support. We believe that creating/proving the Community Source model – and Kuali projects in particular – exemplify how the decade of Mellon RIT investment achieved its transformative goal. From these lessons, higher education is able to incubate new projects and sustain its existing ones through our own means as that was always a wise requirement from the beginning.

The Kuali Foundation Board of Directors