Mark Shuttleworth chimes in on the Open Textbook topic.
“Open Textbooks” is a powerful idea; in some ways I think it even exceeds Free Software. “Open Source” has shown remarkable efficiency in the market, even to those antagonistic to the principles that make it so.
If the idea of “Open” – and the more important, if downplayed, foundation of Freedom - can make headway in the market, imagine the impact it might make in Government and Education. In those areas, once can at least mention concepts like Freedom and Public Good without being accused of being a communist.
#1 by Jamie on September 5, 2010 - 2:33 am
the entire GPL is ‘communist.’ That’s why everyone loves it. It’s just the name “Communism” that people are afraid of. If they see FOSS and GPL as ‘sharing’ and hippie koombaya stuff, then they’re more likely to accept it, but on a large scale like university or government, it might take more than Shuttleworth’s money/influence to push these kinds of things through.
e.g. http://www.wikipedia.com is never considered in the world of academia a credible source anymore. If the FOSS community is self sovereign, then someone will always raise the question as to the authority of the information/code/etc. Of course this is not fair, they’re just skipping a publishing house (the phds that is) and collaborating on the internet, but that’s not good enough for the critics. And the critics are much louder than the supporters, unfortunately.
#2 by Danyl Strype on September 12, 2010 - 6:35 pm
I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but here in Aotearoa (NZ) the idea of freeing publicly-funded information and education materials is rapidly gaining traction. CreativeCommons licensing has now been formally recommended across all of government as part of the NZ GOAL framework. Otago Polytechnic have adopted CC-BY as the default license for work produced by their staff, and are supporting the work of Wayne Macintosh of WikiEducator/ Open Education Foundation.