This is old news. See
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/04/1141228 (April 4th).
Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)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(a)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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