One of the biggest misconceptions in software is that open source equals free. The early commercial open-source vendors like MySQL and JBoss were able to build decent businesses on top of a license/support-only business model, but over time we've seen that approach become difficult to grow beyond a certain threshold.
There is one thing college students don’t need when it comes to their software: another expense. With books, tuition and the million other expenses that come with going to college, the last thing you should have to pay for is some decent software.
A blog entry showing an interesting interaction between a student showing linux to some friends and a teacher who questions the legality of free software.
O'Reilly media is presenting a free webcast next week on
Drupal, an open source content management system. One of
the presenters, Jeff Eaton, is one of the core
developers of the system.
What is open source hardware? Briefly, these are projects that creators have decided to completely publish all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings and "board" files to recreate the hardware - they also allow any use, including commercial. Similar to open source hardware like Linux, but hardware centric.
Open source software is sometimes called Free software or FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), because of four tenets of freedom that are a core part of the philosophy of the open source movement. First, you are free to run these software packages for any purpose--you generally don’t pay anything to acquire them. Second, the source code is free--you can see the code and understand how it works. Third, you are free to copy and redistribute the package to anyone you want. And finally, you are free to modify the software however you like, and to release those modifications.
SchoolForge's mission is to unify independent organizations that advocate, use, and develop open resources for education. We advocate the use of open texts and lessons, open curricula, free software and open source in education
Proposal to make primary source documents used by journalists available online for the public to search. Interesting points in the comments about copyright issues and the difference between primary and mediated information.
This article describes a debate that took place at the
Educause conference concerning the use of open source
and commercial applications in education.