Re:Good article, but missed the negatives!!! (Score 1)

Basically Open Content and Free Software are sister-movements. Both are battles against the privatisation of knowledge.

Free Software has existed long before the FSF, but it wasn't called that way. In the same way Open content has always existed, long before we started calling it "Open Content". The most well known is the Gutenberg Project that started in '71. In the some way, the whole internet could be called Open Content.

Free Software as such was first defined by RMS, in reaction to the problem of proprietary software, and it became a movement to overcome that problem. In the same way Open Content, defined as such, is a reaction to the privatisation of what used to be public knowledge. The start of a true "Open Content Movement" is yet to come, but it will come.

Today you are able to buy a book. But if the book becomes an e-book, you can't buy it anymore, you just get a license. And these licenses become more and more restrictive like EULA's. And with DRM your e-book will destruct themselves after a month unless you keep paying and paying..

Now ask yourself the following: for centuries, public libraries have had an enormous beneficiary effect on our society by making information, accessible. But what is the digital equivalent of a public library? Once people will realise that there won't be a public digital library, just commercial content, a true "Open Content Movement" will be born with the goal of fighting this problem by creation free works that cannot be approriated with DRM.

Open Content today lacks a bit of a problem, because the privatisation of knowlegde is not yet really visible. But unfortunately, it will. I believe the Open Content Movement will grow from the field of education. Universities will have to choose. MIT and Rice already made their choice.
MIT OpenCourseWare: http://ocw.mit.edu/
The Connexions Project: http://cnx.rice.edu/

what about other universities? Which one will take the next plunge?

California has started "The Open Source Textbook Project" to create freely distributable textbooks.
http://www.opensourcetext.org/

Wikipedia recently started a textbook project
textbook.wikipedia.org

Open content in Education Initiative
http://open-education.org

Educommons: http://www.educommons.org

Physiology: http://harveyproject.org/

Open Source Physics
http://www.opensourcephysics.org/

The Open Source Teaching Project
http://ostp.open.ac.uk/project.htm

The Free University Project
http://www.freeuniversityproject.org/

Open Source - Open Course
http://www.tltgroup.org/OpenSource/Base.ht m
http://www.life-open-content.org/index.html
ht tp://www.opencourse.info/
http://www.opencourse.o rg
http://www.fulcrum.org
http://www.openhistory .net/

And if you are jewish check out this one:
http://www.opensourcejudaism.com/
http://ww w.opensourcehaggadah.com/

But also third world countries will realise they have a lot to benefit from free accessible and free distributable content
http://www.openknowledge.net/
The United Nations has a big role to play in this.

Quality control anyone?
Distributed Proofreaders of Project gutenberg
http://www.pgdp.net/c/
http://www.comm ontext.org/
http://www.theassayer.org/

Another thing that is absolute fitted for open content are more complete reference works. Projects that take one item to its full-depth of general encyclopedias:

http://www.marxists.org/
http://www.hegel.net/
http://www.orditur-telas.com/pliny/

wikipedia has 150.000 articles from mixed quality, but this in only 2 years. Imagine this project over 30 years.

Planetmath is an online community creating a Free Math-encyclopedia, this in reaction to what happened to Eric Weissteins World of Mathematics that suddenly disappeared from the web.

HEML is a very interesting history project that can automatically place history events on a map or dynamically create timelines from XML-data.
www.heml.org

Art History [10.000+ public domain images]
http://www.the-athenaeum.org/

Some projects are perfectly fit to work as Open Content but don't realize this:
http://www.all-species.org/
http://www.ros ettaproject.org/
http://www.cmu.edu/oli [open content? they didn't respond to me]

Just like in Free Software, when enough mature projects come into being, symbiosis grows.
What would happen if we would combine some of these projects: Imagine you want to learn something about Einstein: In Wikipedia you would find a biography, in Gutenburg to full texts of his writings, in HEML a timeline of his life combined with other historical events that happend during his lifetime, to opencourse.org for a full textbook on relativity, and then to planetmath for full reference article on special/general theory of relativity,brownian motion,einstein-bose condensate, throw in some java-applets to show some time-dilatation. And maybe the prelinger archives contains some old Einstein-footage.

I think no commercial system in the world would be able to compete with that. Now we just have to create it. And reduce some copyright-duration too.

Part of the Open Content wave in Open Acemic Publishing:
http://www.doaj.org/
http://www.soro s.org/openaccess/
http://www.publiclibraryofscien ce.org/
http://www.biomedcentral.com
[Biomedcent ral is to Elsevier as Red Hat is to Microsoft]

For a list of open content projects
http://www.opencontentlist.com/resources .shtml
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_content

Or dive in my own directory at www.opencursus.be
150 Open Content Textbooks
http://www.opencursus.be/modules.php?na me=Download s

100 Open content related links
http://www.opencursus.be/modules.php?op=mod load&na me=Web_Links&file=index&l_op=viewlink&cid= 8

If you know some projects or free courses that aren't in there, please contact me.