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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."
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!"?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Because Lawrence Lessig is cool Stanford Professor that argued in front of the Supreme Court about copyright extensions, and Richard Stallman is hippy-looking MIT drop-out that argues with geeks about Linux really being GNU/Linux? :)
Related to topic (and more related to my field of study) is the question of journal articles. Most journals are contributed to by academics, and the academics don't get paid to write in the journals. However, the journals are copyrighted to the teeth, and for an academic/researcher/scientist trying to get access to the journals you have to pay.
That seems like quite an outdated method to me, but it hangs on because of the prestige associated with the older journals (MISQ is a big one in Information Systems). I hope to soon see some prestigious journals coming along with something like a creative commons license, or even better (though much less likely for financial reasons), a big journal swapping all their content over to creative commons.
It just seems ludicrous that these publishers, who no longer serve a purpose, get paid as the gatekeepers to knowledge in so many fields when it would otherwise be free. Most of the Editors of the Journals are luminaries that get paid nothing, and the contributors to the field get paid nothing as well. With web access meaning you can hit a huge audience virtually instantly at a low cost, why not free the information?
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