publicOSS

The idea of licensing a piece of software in a way that you cannot modify it or distribute copies of it comes from the book industry. Of course, at the beginning it was not hard to enforce these rules because nobody has a printing equipment to home-make copies of books (if you are interested in this part of the history, the book I recommended before Against Intellectual Monopoly has an interesting description of this point and how some countries allow book-piracy to increase their intellectual sources). Free Libre Open Source Software activists think that if everybody can contribute to write code, then everybody should be able to take advantage of that.

Now, the later idea is a notion that could be hard to emulate in the printing industry. Of course there is not surprising that people advocating FLOSS go against the traditional printing business model and publish their books with a open license (i.e. Creative Commons). The Against Intellectual Monopoly book is a good example of that. Well, things are changing.

Preston McAffe from the California Institute of Technology wrote a book: Introduction to Economics and published under a Creative Commons license. The book is not only use in Caltech, but othercolleges have chosen to use it as main textbook for their classes. This is a quote from the book’s website:

Why open source? Academics do an enormous amount of work editing journals and writing articles and now publishers have broken an implicit contract with academics, in which we gave our time and they weren’t too greedy. Sometimes articles cost $20 to download, and principles books regularly sell for over $100. They issue new editions frequently to kill off the used book market, and the rapidity of new editions contributes to errors and bloat. Moreover, textbooks have gotten dumb and dumber as publishers seek to satisfy the student who prefers to learn nothing. Many have gotten so dumb (“simplified”) so as to be simply incorrect. And they want $100 for this schlock? Where is the attempt to show the students what economics is actually about, and how it actually works? Why aren’t we trying to teach the students more, rather than less?

http://www.introecon.com/blurb.html

It makes sense. If the principles of physics have not changed from last year to this year, why do I need a new edition?

Well, my intention is not going after any business, but providing ideas for governments from this situation. Therefore, what about an open content educational repository for schools? What about governments creating (or hiring someone to do it) elementary and high school textbooks and putting them on a Creative Commons license? Will that be a good way to low the costs of education?