This is old news. See http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/04/1141228 (April 4th).
Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
Perhaps Larry could write an article critical of MIT's project...
I don't see that to be necessary.
http://web.mit.edu/ocw/ocw-facts.html says,
The policies toward the intellectual property created for MIT OCW will be clear and consistent with other policies for scholarly material used in education. Faculty will retain ownership of most materials prepared for MIT OCW, following the MIT policy on textbook authorship. MIT will retain ownership only when significant use has been made of the Institute's resources.
But that page also says:
The materials on the OCW site will be open and freely available worldwide for non-commercial purposes such as research and education, providing an extraordinary resource, free of charge, which others can adapt to their own needs.
Right away, this sounds better to me than today's situation, which requires the purchase of expensive textbooks to acquire substantial knowledge. Let's wait to see what the CONTENT looks like. When I was as the 'Tute, many of my courses were taught from course notes -- the textbooks were published years later. If OCW includes detailed course notes, it could be a tremendous benefit.
lcrocker@nupedia.com wrote:
I checked out the site after reading this, and they are NOT releasing the courseware to the public domain, or even some open-content-like license; they explicitly retain full copyrights on all the material, so it's useless to us.
Nonsense! It's far from useless to Wikipedians. The whole intent of the project is to make educational materials available for free! So Wikipedians should use the materials to educate themselves, then write encyclopedia articles based on what they have LEARNED.
Criticism of a project as bold as this could cause backlash -- especially given Wikipedia's already-cool reception by so many academics. I think Wikipedia should praise MIT for its innovativeness. Let's wait to see what the content looks like and how it feels to play by their IP rules before throwing stones.
<>< Tim, MIT '84 http://www.wikipedia.com/Tim_Chambers
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