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There are three open-source gradebook programs listed on Freshmeat, one of which is my own. I'd be interested in talking more about gradebooks off-list...

One good thing about what's happening in the article is that they may get entire districts buying in to Linux. It's much harder for an individual teacher to do on a classroom-by-classroom basis. The computer folks at my school have neither the time nor the skills to help me integrate Linux boxes into their network.

Another positive is that lots of schools are using Macs, and will soon be using MacOS X. That gets Unix's foot in the door.

Another good example is CPAN. I have a Perl/Tk-based GUI app, which I've tried to make relatively easy to install, but inevitably, the user is going to have to use CPAN to install some modules. The first time you run CPAN, it asks you for decisions about a zillion options. For instance, it wants to know what continent you're on. Are you in Tahiti? Then apparently there's a special CPAN server located conveniently nearby. God forbid that all those Tahitians should be downloading from servers in the US.

The installer is always the first part of your UI that the user sees. Unfortunately, it may also be the last.

... Charles Vest, president of MIT, as an aside mentioned that when college textbook presses (like the one at MIT) put up free e-text copies of their new textbooks at the same time they published the print version, sales of the print versions went UP.

If it works to increase the sale for things as over priced as the normal college textbook...

Does anyone know what the actual textbook(s) is he's referring to? AFAIK, my site The Assayer is the biggest catalog on the web of books that have been intentionally made free-as-in-something by their authors, and I don't have any of the examples he's referring to. I'd be grateful if anyone could reply here about what they are, so I can add them in.

What he's saying matches up perfectly with my own experience with self-publishing free books. My own books are free-as-in-copyleft, and are also for sale in dead tree format. I've done very little traditional promotion, and yet my books have been fairly successful, considering that it's not easy for a self-published author to break into the textbook market. As the author of the article points out, it's pretty hard to know for sure whether certain sales results are the result of any particular action, such as making books available for free in digital form. But one good indication is that the small amount of non-web promotion that I did (sending out free evaluation copies on CD) was nearly all in California, whereas none of the teachers who have adopted my books are in California.

Walker is an interesting character. He has some very cool free-as-in-beer server-side astronomy software on his site, although it's a shame it doesn't seem to be open source. But then, this is a guy who helped found Autodesk, which used hardware dongles to prevent copying...

Here is a side-by-side diff. The main change seems to be that they've added some explicit discussion of no-warranty clauses. Not a momentous change, really -- does anyone really get sued because they gave away a book for free, and the book had a mistake in it???

They just don't think it would make good business sense, and most publishers probably are in the business to make money, not for good will.
Clearly your generalization fails in some of the cases I mentioned above. I think some publishers have realized that, at least for certain kinds of books, having it available online is a form of free publicity, and doesn't necessarily subtract from sales. After all, most people don't want to read a book off of a computer screen, or have to have it in the form of a stack of unbound, single-sided printer output. Personally (here's my shameless plug), I've had some luck selling printed copies of my own self-published copylefted books, even though they're free downloads.

In reply to the original poster's question, you might want to look at (shameless plug #2!) this list of copylefted books, which is from the database of my book-reviewing site The Assayer. That way you can get an idea of what licenses other people are using.

WYSIWYG is also a pain in many ways:

1. You may not be able to tell -- or control -- what's actually in your file. For example, it shouldn't matter whether I type two spaces or one following the period at the end of a sentence -- it should just do the right thing. LaTeX does this, but WYSIWYG software generally doesn't.
2. There is the temptation to do all your formatting by selecting fonts, etc., rather than by sticking strictly with a stylesheet. For instance, I have some books I wrote in PageMaker, and somewhere inside some of them there is some Geneva, even though I meant to do all the sans serif in Helvetica. I can't find the Geneva! It must be inside a figure somewhere.
3. WYSIWYG often translates into what-you-want-to-see-is-what-you-have-to-put-in-by -hand. For instance, I have some boilerplate text that appears at the top of the homework problems in each chapter of my books. In LaTeX, if I want to change it, I just change the relevant macro. In WYSIWYG software, I'd have to manually edit every single chapter.

LaTeX does have some disadvantages, however:

1. No unicode support.
2. Setting up a complicated document is extremely difficult and time-consuming. For instance, the .cls file for this open-source book took me about two weeks to set up.
3. LaTeX/TeX is a nightmate as a programming language. The code is extremely difficult to read, and since it's a macro language, it's very hard to debug. You end up doing a lot of procedural programming in a language that simply isn't anyone's idea of a good procedural programming language.
4. Related to LaTeX's macro-language nature is the fact that its error messages are hard to interpret. And there are a lot of them. When I compile my 600-page book, it takes about five minutes for all the warnings to scroll past , at a rate of about a screenful per second!

Lyx sounds interesting, although I haven't tried it. I'm not sure to what extent it just creates typical WYSIWYG problems while getting rid of typical non-WYSIWYG problems.

An important consideration is that TeX/LaTeX is open source, and there are free-as-in-beer implementations on virtually every platform. If you're trying to exist in the world of open source, you really need to use open-source tools.

Once in a while you actually want to run client-side software via the Web, and then you want an applet. For most people, however, this is very rare. I'm not against applets (I wrote an open-source planetarium applet, and it's moderately popular). I'm just against using them in stupid ways. And, as people have already said in other comments on this story, it's nightmarish to consider the security problems that would come up if you allowed applets in languages that weren't specifically designed with Java's security and no-crash features. The same things that make me enjoy programming in Perl more than in Java are also the things that make Java applets safe for users.

One difficult issue with GFDL is that everything has to be available in a form that can be edited with free software. This is a big problem for people who do their line art using proprietary software. For example, I did a book using Adobe Illustrator for the line art. When I decided to open-source the book, it wasn't legally possible for me to use GFDL -- I had to use OPL. In this respect, I think GFDL can be a license in search of a technology.

A related issue is that I don't think Nupedia has really finalized their decisions on what formats to use for illustrations and for equations...?

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The Web democratized publishing, and gazillions of people have now published the equivalent of short articles via the internet -- they're called web pages. As for full-length books, there are (see my sig) something like 150 free-as-in-beer or free-as-in speech books that I know of (not counting old public-domain books). Commercial publishers have even started making books free-as-in-beer (example).

What about music? Mutopia is doing a great job with public-domain music (does anyone understand how tedious it is to enter a long piece of complex classical music into LilyPond notation by hand, with no GUI???), but it's amazing what a wasteland the net is for music intentionally made free by living artists. I made an ill-fated attempt to create a site for free-as-in-speech music (focusing more on recent stuff). Now I made a lot of blunders, so really I just have to count this as an learning experience in how not to build an online community. But it's still just a little shocking that there's virtually no free-as-in-speech modern music on the web. (I contributed a few of my own jazz tunes, but I don't claim they're anything earthshattering.)

This is particularly pathetic because there's so much music notation software that's either free (LilyPond) or cheap (Lime).

Maybe it's just that the musicians' culture hasn't gotten hip to free information. I guess musicians are so used to getting ripped off by record companies, etc., that they are in defense mode, and won't even consider setting their music free?

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

(1) Since the author retains the rights and only pays $100, it sounds like we're talking about print-on-demand??? From what I've seen, POD technology isn't really ready for prime time, but maybe that's just because the POD publishers are still doing the authors' layout and design for them, which eats up a lot of money. For geek publishing, it might make sense just to require them to submit PDF or LaTeX and do all the layout and design themselves.

(2) Marketing is very important. Most authors' biggest complain about POD -- and vanity POD even more so -- is that the publisher doesn't lift a finger to promote the book. Do you intend to do any marketing, or is it up to the authors? (But see my sig for one way to get free promotion of a book.)

(3) Are the books going to be available as free downloads? I've actually been reasonably successful at selling print copies of my own books, even though they're available as free downloads (and one is open-source). But I'm not convinced my situation is analogous to what you're talking about. First off, my books are textbooks, and students are going to read them cover to cover (well, at least they're supposed to do that :-). Nobody reads a book cover-to-cover from a CRT, so their choice is either to download and print it (expensive, and you end up with a thick stack of single-sided output), or buy a nice bound, printed copy from me. But when it comes to technical books, most people are using them for reference. If you offer it in electronic form, they're likely to download it, put it on their hard disk, and refer to it as necessary. Here's a sobering fact for you: I get maybe 500 downloads/week of my book, but retail sales are about 1/week. Virtually all my sales are wholesale. If I had to depend on retail sales, I would have given up a long time ago.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

"Light and Matter Physics" High School/Community college level.

"Handbook Of Applied Cryptography"

"Numerical Recipes in {c, fortran}"

"The Scientist & Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing"

"Using Z"

"The Red Book"

etc. I'm sure there are a ton of others.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Another thing to do if you support this experiment with free (-as-in-beer) information is to write a review of one of these books on The Assayer, which is a nonprofit site I run for user-submitted book reviews with an emphasis on free books. All reviews are copyleft licensed, and the site is noncommercial.

All ten of the Baen books are now listed (so far without reviews) in the site's literature section.

One of the main arguments people have made against free books is that without a publisher, you have no filter in place to get rid of the junk. The Assayer aims to disprove that argument by providing a forum for people to discuss which free books are good and which are bad.

</self-promotion>

By supporting Baen in this experiment, you'll also be helping encourage publishers to take the next step, which is to publish books that are free-as-in-speech, or at least partially free-as-in-speech, e.g. using OPL with the A&B options that prevent other print publishers from selling the same book in print. Until they take that step, there's always the possibility that publishers will make free-as-in-beer books not free again. This has happened with about 30 Macmillan computer science titles. You'll find them all listed on IPL as if they were free, but when you click on the link, you get a message saying they're no longer available for free.

You also have to realize that the publishing industry really doesn't know how this is going to play out. They'll try stuff and see if it works. They'll try antibooks. They'll try lame stuff like putting books online, but only with every single page as a bitmap, so that it's completely impractical to read them. (iUniverse, Dorling Kindersley, and Electric Press do this.)

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Anyone else think this might be useful?
Yes! All the people who wrote the books listed there!

Unfortunately, I think K-12 may be the hardest place to start making free-information inroads into textbooks. The politics you have to go through in most states to get a K-12 book approved is just horrendous.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The other problem with doing equations as bitmaps is that it breaks the functionality of the web. Visually impaired people can make the font bigger, but the equations will stay small. You can't search through it. You can't do text-to-speech. You can't change your stylesheet and have all the equations change style as well.

As far as LaTeX,

1. it's never going to be learned by more than 0.01% of the world's population,
2. it represents a 1970's-style approach to making a user interface (ooh, you mean I get my own terminal instead of having to hand someone a stack of punched cards?), and
3. its aggressive stance on separating form from content means that you have to jump through hoops to make a complicated layout turn out how you want it.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The other problem with doing equations as bitmaps is that it breaks the functionality of the web. Visually impaired people can make the font bigger, but the equations will stay small. You can't search through it. You can't do text-to-speech. You can't change your stylesheet and have all the equations change style as well.

As far as LaTeX,

1. it's never going to be learned by more than 0.01% of the world's population,
2. it represents a 1970's-style approach to making a user interface (ooh, you mean I get my own terminal instead of having to hand someone a stack of punched cards?), and
3. its aggressive stance on separating form from content means that you have to jump through hoops to make a complicated layout turn out how you want it.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

If Opera or iCab ever support it, that would probably finally motivate me to dump NS 4.72. But I'm sorry, I just refuse to downgrade to the latest NS/Mozilla/IE. Every browser is just bigger, slower, and more buggy than the last. What I really want is NS 4.73 -- you know, the bug-release version of NS 4.72 that would never crash, and would fix bugs like incorrect rendering of stylesheets.

I think we're looking at a really long delay -- maybe 10 years -- before anyone can really start writing MathML into their pages with any confidence that the typical user will have a browser that displays it correctly. Look at Java 1.1. It's been years since 1.1 came out, and I still have to have a warning at the top of my 1.1 applet's page explaining that it won't work with the NS+MacOS combination.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

As the author of a free book, worries about this kind of abuse are one of the most common reactions I get when I talk to people who aren't familiar with free information. The crucial point is that the internet is the perfect tool for publicizing free information projects and giving people a place to check whether the thing they're paying for might really be available for free. In the case of books, people should know to check the IPL, On-Line Books Page, Andamooka, and the site immodestly listed in my sig. I'm not as familiar with the equivalents for software, but I imagine SourceForge would be a good starting point.

Several reasons:

1. It seems to be a Law of Nature that open-source projects attract the most help when they need it the least -- i.e. once they're mature. At the beginning, it makes sense to do everything you can to encourage people to participate, including enticing them with binaries.
2. Early on is when people are most likely to encounter problems compiling through no fault of their own. Come on, how many software projects are designed to be perfectly platform- and compiler-independent from the ground up?
3. If you're starting out with a one-person project, you have the luxury of waiting as long as you want before you even open-source the code. Suppose you write an initial version that is full of security holes, but that does demonstrate some key functionality. You might want to release a binary, then spend a month fixing the security, then open-source the project.

I think it depends a lot on the project. My only open-source project is an applet that shows the planets in the night sky. I've gotten lots of help from strangers with translating it into various languages, and that's actually the full extent of other people's involvement since I open-sourced it. I don't think any of those people would have known or cared about the project if it hadn't already been an applet that was sitting there on my web page and was actually useful for something.

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In large part, the difference in the examples you give is not so much gravity, but other issues

I don't think your argument:

In all cases, the amount of damage sustained is controlled primarily by the 'square-cube' law - the strength of the body's structural components goes up as the square of the size, but the mass goes up as the cube of the size.

See here for more.