OSDDP: Involving Students With Open Source Docs

cel4145 writes "The Professional Writing Program at Purdue University recently began the Open Source Development and Documentation Project (OSDDP) where students and instructors across multiple sections of business and technical writing are producing documentation for and about open source applications (see the press release or a mirror). The community and project are modeled after the open source development model and based on service learning principles. For example, students are already working on end user documentation and case study analysis for Drupal and market research and analysis for OpenOffice. Completed texts will be published using a Creative Commons license."

Comments

License

[Pan T. Hose]

Does anyone know why the Creative Commons license was used instead if the GNU Free Documentation License? Are those licenses compatible? For example, would it be possible to made that work available on Wikibooks and parts of that documentation incorporated into relevant Wikipedia articles? I hope so, becuase it is going to be a magnificent project and Wikipedia is a central respository of free knowledge today.

Pros and Cons

[fembots]

I can see a couple of advantages such as independant, objective and professional documentation for Open Source.

On the other hand, I'm also concerned that these documentations might not be as in-depth as if they were written by the persons involved in these projects.

I mean, will we see a similar case like "The marketing department never understands what we IT is really doing!"?

Re:License-Gatekeepers! Set my information free.

[_Sprocket_]

For all forms of knowledge there are gatekeepers. Even your beloved Internet has a gatekeeper know as an ISP.

My ISP is being a poor gatekeeper then. I can change service to another ISP. I can go to my local internet cafe. I can go the the library. I can wait until I go to work. In all cases, I can access the same information without my ISP either being aware of or having any say in that access.

Yes, lets hold up as a good example of what we'll get, The Internet. OK so you've just read something on the web. So how do you know it is correct?

Something gets printed in a Journal. How do you know it is correct? The same process of peer review and established trust can be done with the web. And, in fact, has been done for quite some time.

and I'll bite back

[TAGmclaren]

You assume I know nothing about the whole controversy, when in fact I do. I've met RMS, I've heard him speak about what drives him.

The quip at the start was meant to be humour. You asked why they're using creative commons - I said because RMS is a hippy-looking MIT drop-out (using the second definition of the word), which is all true.

Now, without wanting to disturb you up there on your soap box, what matters when picking sides over this for most people isn't reality. It's perception. Laurence Lessig is the foremost authority on electronic IP right now, known widely amongst the community for his ideals. RMS is known mostly only within the IT fraternity, and even then people think of him as some smelly monk whose interesting but for the most part to be avoided.

So, assume you're a Joe Blow (no law degree or PhD, as you quite proudly boast) and you have to pick a license. Do you:
a) pick the guy who has stood up in front of the supreme court fighting for the prevention of copyright extensions, and who developed the licence that The Beastie Boys have released work under; or
b) pick the guy that quit MIT, is in serious need of a haircut/shave and who gets up on his soapbox regularly about it should be GNU/Linux, not just Linux?

Doesn't matter about whose right or whose wrong. It's just how it's perceived. I admire RMS, I think the world needs people like him, but I think that what he's proposing is flawed. I think that Linus's philosophy is much more realistic than RMS's semi-communist approach, and in trying to create freedom for the users he denies freedom for the developers - the people whose software it is.

Regardless, the original quip was meant humourously (note the smiley). So just relax a bit, ok? :)