This BBC recent article proclaims Linux as going mainstream. [Side Note: Did anyone else see the IBM Linux commercial during the Super Bowl last night?]
What I really liked was the following quote from Simon Phipps:
"If you spend a dollar with a local company working on Linux, that dollar stays in your economy," said Simon Phipps of Sun Microsystems.
"When you spend a dollar with a multi-national corporation as a license fee for a piece of software, that dollar leaves your country."
"It's about keeping the money in your local economy, developing skills and developing the local economy to be strong in its own right in a global context."
This idea needs some more work, but here goes. Suppose that instead of buying proprietary software and having students buy textbooks, universities instead had IT and facutly contribute to open source/open content projects? Granted, tuition would have to be raised slightly to cover the increased need for faculty to work on open content projects (IT development of open source software is money which is already in the budget), but this raise would be offset by savings to students in textbooks. Particuarly, I'm thinking of larger, core courses. I think our first year writing course at FSU has anywhere upwards of 5,000 students taking ENC 1101 in the fall. Multiply that 5,000 by $30 in texts (much less than what most students pay_--$150,000--which could go to hiring faculty to work on open content projects. And the idea, of course, is that such faculty would be working with other faculty at other institutions, not in single author, cathedral-mode developmental model.
re: OS/OA at colleges & universities
While we're removing Microsoft from the institutional intranet, let's ditch Blackboard and other proprietary courseware, & library subscriptions to professional journals published by Reed Elsevier. Knowing what universities shell out for Bb and other such packages, I tend to think it'd be a net savings for everyone.
Skyrocketing text book prices
I was watching the news the other night and there was a big story about how text book costs have increase by 32% over the past eight years. New York Senator Charles Schumer had a press conference with PRIG on this and is proposing a $1000 tax break. I think Charlie's idea makes more sense in the long term. If we took that $1000/student and put into open content production we'd go a long way to reducing the costs of education. Of course then we wouldn't be getting those fat kickbacks from the text book publishers :)
Shumer's office did a survey in New York and found: "the average cost of required textbooks [. . .] totaled $922. Science classes like biology and chemistry often required students to spend as much as $150 on textbooks. Social science courses like Economics require textbooks in the $100 range while Humanities courses often required $60-80 dollars worth of books."
We've got to Mobilize!
I like the attitudes I'm seeing here. It's about time some tech-savvy academics took our knowledge to the "masses"--we could nourish and deliver quality content for less than 1% of what commercial textbook publishers rip our students. It's absolutely DISGUSTING to me the way the "agents" from these companies brown-nose, bribe, and threaten our faculty into "choosing" their texts.
How the hell did we ever get in this mess anyway?
Let's give teachers an offer they can't refuse: Open content, or go public with accusations of taking bribes and laundering money.