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What Makes an OSS Class Work?
AnimalCoward writes "I teach a Continuing Education courses in OO programming at our local state university. An email was just sent out from the program director asking if any instructors were interested in developing, and teaching, a course in OSS. My question to the slashdot crowd is: What would you want to see in an OSS class? What should be included? Should I bring up all the discussions about liability and multiple OSS licenses? The request didn't state it, but from experience I believe the students would have a programming background ranging from only mainframes to C++ to those with some Java experience."
OSS isn't strictly an IT issue. It's a rights issue. Who owns software? software design? concepts? ideas? thoughts? This sounds like what I should have been taught in our semester of IT Law (As apposed to the far too specific individual legal cases to do with Data Protection Act (still very interesting though)). If you were to take this class. A major part of the course would have to be the GPL. This has to be the most clear cut academic outline of OSS. In short... Very good idea :)
What else you ask?
Uhhh, I just thought of an important one. What about "how to make money?"
On this point, I think the example of Zope is illustrative. Investor Hadar Pedhazur was willing to pony up venture capital to fund Zope Corporation, on the condition that they open-source Zope. I'm not really a Zope fan, but the idea of an investor requiring a company to open-source their principal asset struck me as a hard-dollar vote for the value of OSS.
See this for refs:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/ZopeBook/IntroducingZope
More detail:
http://washington.bizjournals.com/washington/stor
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