Open Source Course Materials
by jcf. Average Reading Time: less than a minute.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about ever since announcing the Ruby On Rails Training in Zurich is if I should “Open source” the course materials (maybe even making the development process open, so everybody could see where I am, what I’m doing)
Today I attended a talk by Cory Doctorow who talked on “Digital Restriction Management (DRM)”. One of the analogies to protected content he gave was as follows (paraphrased)
One of the early sciences was alchemy. Alchemists kept their results secret. Consequently, everyone of them had to make the experience that drinking mercury is a bad idea. Also the science stagnated. One day one decided to publish his results and the the field took off. The 500 years before that even are called the dark ages, the hundred years following are called enlightenment
Would the same hold true for sharing course materials? Would someone steal it? What are the things speaking for this idea, what is against it? What are your thoughts?
Technorati Tags: lift06, opensource, rubyonrails, schulung, training
Someone will “borrow” parts of your course one way or the other- could be from official paid course materials too.
If you opensource it, from “web-sperience” , multitudes of your grateful beneficieries will link and re-link to you and in the long run you will benefit from it.(by way of training /oppurtunities) .Open-Source is serious and a way of ensuring your IP.
my 2 centimes…
Remember the other part of Corys talk about his own experience with one of his books. Basically people still bought it in droves even though it was downloaded 650K times for free – in fact allowing free downloads encourage a wider circulation.