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OLPC and CC Free Content Drive
gnujoshua writes "In his blog, SJ Klein, director of community content for OLPC, notes a collaboration among Creative Commons, One Laptop per Child, and TextbookRevolution.org. They are compiling together free and CC-licensed works — and they are asking for people to help them by submitting links to free books, movies, and music. Creative Commons will be burning a LiveDVD to be distributed at South by Southwest; OLPC will be making bundles of books to send all over the world; and Textbook Revolution will be compiling a list of good and free college-level textbooks for the relaunch of their site."
We can see who's who in academics- whether publishers will be willing to release work to third-world countries that could never possibly afford to buy it and desperately need it for their education. In America at least they can hoard journals and information and demand payment because that's how the industry works- but I'll be very impressed (and surprised) if they admit that that doesn't apply at all to donating to OLPC..
OK, this is only marginally on topic (but WTF it may be FP so it will get modded offtopic or redundant anyway) but the words "Free Content" mande me think of the content-free encyclopedia.
For those of us who care.
I should say something about the actual topic but...
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Education in desperately poor countries has too long been held back by the lack of drum-and-bass loops and slash fiction about Professor Snape and Captain Janeway.
http://thepiratebay.org/
sorted...
Simply put -- why aren't we hearing about a focus on education that matters -- in the languages of those who need it most?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Why bother with CDs or DVDs? Why not just pump that shizzle right onto the laptops being given away or sold for dirt cheap?
How to Download YouTube Videos
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Peter Watts Has his Rifters series as well as Blindsight up on a CC license. Good series for those who haven't read it.
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
Then again...
Parenting classes? Me? Why? Oh come onnnnnnnnn...
The Banjo Players Must Die!
One of the more important and not-commonly-know goals of OLPC is for electronic textbooks.
The people who stand to benefit from OLPC are popularly seen as becoming computer literate, but the real benefit is the fact that these people do not have access to textbooks.
The OLPC project, with its extremely power-efficient ebook reader mode, attemps to solve the problem of out-of-date textbooks (and no textbooks at all).
For delivery of electronic textbooks, the Worldspace satellite radio service (http://www.worldspace.com/) already offers 128 kbps for the common good. This bandwidth is available to most of the people who stand to benefit from OLPC (except South America) and is a suitable delivery platform for textbooks.
Kriston
What's needed are the professors and students to do this. So of the best textbooks I had in college were published through the University printing department for the cost of materials.
I took a course in Technical Business Writing for where as a final project we had to write a real manual for an existing product. That sort of class could easily churn out several good textbooks a semester.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Open content is a good idea because it makes information freely available to a larger number of people for no additional cost (compared with limited distribution). However, there is still some fixed cost to be absorbed somewhere in the chain to support the administration and management of legitimate peer review. Presently, publishers absorb this cost. Frankly, it's a pittance compared with the profits they reap from electronic journals, but the service is nonetheless essential for preventing the confusion that would arise if non-peer-reviewed electronic media were not distinguished in a meaningful way from peer reviewed media.
Similar observations can be made regarding academic book publishing.
We live in an age where knowledge and information may be distributed more broadly and democratically than ever before. The corollary is that anti-knowledge and disinformation travel through that same, free pipe.
The free distribution of politically purposed disinformation ought to be guarded against. For that to occur, the established infrastructure of peer-review must be leveraged. Or replaced with something run by the researchers themselves. A better option for the world we live in, but one that requires funding from somewhere.
objectWizard42
People publish what they know. Not too many people know squat about mosquito control in third world contries, so they create what they can.
This is not a bad thing, but I can see your point about all this stuff masking what is really needed.
As far as stuff being published mostly in English. The text will best be translated by a native speaker who also knows English. Since the OLPC is networked, the translated texts can make it to where they are needed.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
"At the same time, how is it possible to produce those works if you need to spend your time producing something salable so that you can eat? Somebody needs to pay you for something, and the most effective way we've figured out to do that seems to be to restrict availability of what you produce to only those who can pay you for it."
;-)) as a whole, the market rules, and people pay for products they want. But it must be said that the cost for a product consist of the material, and the time/work one put in it. In this respect, digital 'products' are something outside the normal. (And, in extension, all 'IP' is.) The cost of material there is...well, none. One DOES put time/work in it - in the ORIGINAL, but that is often not in comparison to the number of digital copies that can be made. After the original, the time/work that one puts in it, is virtually nothing.
Though I do not doubt that for some (high-cost) things it would cause problems, as a general statement, there are a few answers to your question.
First of, let's not make a false dillemma; it's not a matter of all the time devoted to produce those works, or all the time devoted towards something that earns money - at least, not necessarily. One can, for instance, have another job that earns you money, and create 'art' works (or whatever) as an aside. While time is limited, it's seldom limited to the point where one has absolutely NO time left to do something else than 'work for a living'.
Secondly, while it's not always possible to have one major mecenas (as was the case in the middle ages, often), the internet also provides the possibility (at least, potentially) to have micro-payments. So, instead of one big sponsor, one can have several minor ones. As long as your product is popular, I think there is a definite chance of that. (As an example; see Freenet; it's paying a full time devl for several years now, just by what people donate to the project.)
Secondly; your assertation at the end is false. There have been examples enough where people did not need to pay for something (well, unless one goes into semantics and conclude that only the sun rises for free). It's not an absolute necessity; though of course, in our capitalistic society (which I agree works much better than a communistic one
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I only had time to skim the page, but I could not find who their target audience is.
Teenage American kids?
Developing country schoolchildren?
Programmers?
I'd think the last, from the way they go on and on about the platform and the desktop and such. But then why distribute at SXSW? To bore people and make FOSS seem irrelavant to people at large?
I think the first page of their document should be their motivation and target audience, not what distro of Linux they think is cool.
If they're distributing at SXSW, I think they should have creative CC movies and music.
Lies about crimes
Simply put -- why aren't we hearing about a focus on education that matters -- in the languages of those who need it most?
Because we pride ourselves more on making meaningless gestures to the third-world than on producing real results. That's why we're providing them with laptop computers instead of basic infrastructure and medicine.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
'cause guess what the effort you can muster to build each reproduction is limited; you will do something else if it doesn't pay off, or give you a warm fuzzy feeling.
With knowledge, and anything digitizable, the situation is radically different. This is moglen's point, and this is why people who use industrial-economy analogies to address free culture discussions only embarrass themselves. The situations are *radically different.
It's more like this: if Ernie tells you that 2+3 is 5, and you etch that knowledge into a granite chunk called "the internet" and reproduce it endlessly, even after your death.
As to what you're "depriving the creator" of, how many levels do you go up? Who told Ernie? Do you owe himher a few bucks?
After you die, when people look at the stone you carved and tell others, what are you being deprived of? k, you're dead, how about your children?
It's all a bunch of nonsense, and it proceeds from ignorance about the fundamentals
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
> to recreate the most important bits of knowledge -- public sanitation and mosquito control are two big ones -- as part of an educational program
I would add sex education to the list..
If you are going to learn about mosquito control in more than a superficial manner -- beyond "drop these pills here" -- then you will need some of that "chloroform in print." A real understanding of mosquito control would require a knowledge of biology, ecology, field methods, statistics and probably some other things I'm not aware of. If this weren't the case one could just drop some pamphlets that say something like "slap the little suckers when they land on you," and be done with it.
Public sanitation has the same depth.
There is obviously a problem getting these books into languages that are useful, but I would say that often times college student can speak, or at least read, English well enough to comprehend a text book. That or we can look to the foreign language departments at universities.
A blog about stuff.
Correct. That software doesn't get made. Some other software gets made.
In the same vein, some other ditches don't get dug because the people who potentially would have dug 'em are writing the software that got made.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
"The movement from analog to digital is more important for the structure of social and legal relations than the more famous if less certain movement from status to contract"
Moglen again
It is true that the marginal cost is not actually zero, but I find the difference to be radical. For many of these goods -- let's say an electonic textbook, to get back on topic -- the cost of implementing a system of exclusion, by which non-payers could be reliably prevented from getting access, would astronomically increase the fixed costs.
In fact, the cost of such a system seems to be infinite. Is this not what the DRM whack-a-mole keeps proving?
When the marginal costs get so low that the cost-of-sale (i mean the bare-bones, cost-to-collect) exceeds it, the fundamental economics haven't changed but the practical ones have, namely the concept of selling as selling-individual copies of X. The individual copies are no longer the products, but the aggregate. And you don't sell to the recipients, you sell to someone who's interested in funding the aggregate.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Translation is hard work, and people tend to underestimate how much work it is. My physics textbooks, in English, are free online. Over the years, I've had four or five people contact me, acting extremely enthusiastic about translating them into other languages. One of them translated one chapter into French and then stopped. None of the others actually did any translation. It's the same logic as any open-source software project; although you hear a lot about collaborative development, the bazaar model, etc., actually the vast majority of OSS projects never attract any developers other than the original one.
There are also significant technical obstacles. Producing a high-quality illustrated textbook requires a fairly complicated software setup, and that means that the translators have to be able to reproduce that setup. If you're using proprietary software, you have a problem, because prospective translators aren't going to pay for a copy of it so they can have the privilege of translating a free book for free. If you're using an OSS software stack, then you have the issue that some of the OSS software for this kind of thing is not yet totally mature (e.g., Inkscape is great, but it's still quite new and under heavy development), and some of it is fairly hard to use (e.g., my LaTeX class file for my textbooks runs to 2400 lines of code, plus a few thousand more lines of custom perl scripts).
Find free books.
You are right, "most of the stuff being offered is in English." But, that is why we are asking people to collect materials and post them to the wiki. We need everyones help, this includes non-english speakers who can help us find free texts in other languages. Thank you, and if know another language besides English, please add it to the Wiki, too! -Josh
...you payment, for the extremely small "marginal costs of production" for making digital copies? Swell, this is how the (revolutionary and evolutionary)digital open source knowledge industry works for the most part, although a lot of places are attempting to combine the old methods with the new in a wide variety of success levels....
You create knowledge that is extremely cheap to copy and can be shared cheaply as well, so cheap that it is a trivial amount. This knowledge-this product- is digitally shared, it is a commodity that is tradeable, in classical historical sense, it is yet another form of portable wealth or "money". You in turn get access to other peoples "money" that they share with you, you get "paid" that way, same as with other transactions, just the style of "money" is different.
This is called in economic terms "payment in kind", and people who recognize that and participate within this new digital "payment in kind" economy are already quite collectively "rich" and are getting "richer" daily as they completely bypass the traditional middle man skimming and "interest" and "inflation" and "taxes" that goes on when created wealth has to be represented by the established bankers of the realms and kings closed source "money". And they then take all these riches they accrue and apply them to other sorts of business, which in turn, makes them even more "money", either in kind, or else-wise, back to the kings and bankers representations of actual wealth.
If you are looking for other sorts of payment with other sorts of recognizable and transferable portable wealth loosely defined as money for your particular digital work, if you aren't content with the mass "payment in kind model", the methods are there and are also in common usage, you need to create in the "closed source" manner, DRM hell out of it, hire lawyers, get patents, garner ever increasing and more restrictive laws of the anti free trade "protectionist" kind, apply holograms and watermarks and "activation" so called "keys" and so on and so forth, and be prepared always 24/7 to repel "pirate boarders" and so on.
HTH Good luck!
Truth Happens recently posted a link to an article that proposed ways that artists could be paid for their work in a world in which everything's free. In brief, they are
.pdf for free, but if you really like it and have the money, who wouldn't want the deluxe collector's edition with gold-engraved cover and bookmark? Or an actual DVD box to go on your shelves.
.pdf for free, but you've been following this guy's career for so long that you don't mind paying a few bucks to download the file from his server. Besides, your cash fills up his donation meter and ensures next month's update, or wins the "donation war" for what feature to implement next.
1. Immediacy -- You want something now, and you're willing to pay the artist to speed production of a work.
2. Personalization -- You want something tailored to your needs specifically, like an art request, or a piece of Free / Open-Source Software that does what you need it to do.
3. Interpretation -- Or consultation. Like what Red Hat does, in providing paid support for free software.
4. Authenticity -- Like an artist's seal of approval, it lets you know that your recording is of the actual artist's work (and is certified virus-free).
5. Accessibility -- You could pay clearinghouses of data to keep track of all your songs and such for you. At its lowest level it's paid storage, but it could be more than that.
6. Embodiment -- Anyone can download the
7. Patronage -- You know you could download that
8. Findability -- Not everyone knows how to use P2P networks, or even wants to learn how.
Some of us get everything from the P2P networks. But others, who may not object to borrowing CDs or books from their friends, may still find getting copies of people's work anonymously to be somewhat disquieting. Moreover, they may not know how. These are often the people who buy songs from iTunes and Amazon, because $1 seems like a reasonable price to them for the service they receive.
If you think about it, part of the reason that iTunes is so successful in this age of free downloads is because it combines just about everything on the list. You get authentic recordings immediately, which are automatically sorted on your PC or Mac complete with cover art. You can find songs easily on their store, and you get personalized recommendations as to what other songs you might like. Yes, I know iTunes has DRM, but I also know a lot of people don't even think about it. It's true that we need to educate them about it, but I'm just saying it doesn't factor into their decisions.
I found the article extremely relevant, because I hope to make a living as a content creator selling e-books and physical copies thereof. Maybe what we need is more widespread awareness of how to make money? At any rate, the world I see this evolving into is one in which large, "gateway" institutions like TV stations and book publishers are fewer and farther between, but one in which large numbers of individual content creators can make a living off of their work, and have thriving microcommunities built up around each of them.
Yes, here comes a lazy, selfish, and mean-spirited comment.
I participated in the G1G1 program half for altruistic reasons and half for selfish reasons. (A perfect match for the program, right?) I thought that if nothing else, the XO would make a very satisfactory eBook reader for the wealth of public domain material available from Project Gutenberg.
As with so much about the XO, the hardware is great, and the software is flaky.
I don't see how the Read activity can be regarded as adequate for reading textbooks, at least not in its present form.
The "Read" activity is... unpredictable. It's not clear what file formats it's supposed to work with. The one that works most reliably is PDF. In particular, downloads from Manybooks.net, with translation format set to PDF, Large Print gives access to what seems to be most if not all of Project Gutenberg, with formatting that works quite well for the XO.
My first attempt at reading for pleasure from the XO went very well; the screen was legible, the package was portable, I enjoyed the story (L. Frank Baum, "The Master Key," a very entertaining read by the way).
Until I tried to continue reading a day later and found myself back at page 1, having lost my place.
When you go back in the Journal to a book you've been reading, sometimes it appears to reopen the book at the page where you closed it, and sometimes it loses your place and reopens at page 1. I haven't been able to characterize the behavior well enough to report it as a bug.
The "Keep" feature, which I would have expected to be the right way to save the state of the Read activity, always reports a "Keep error."
There is no way to bookmark a page, at least not one that I've been able to find.
The XO is not clever about the journal titles that it assigns to downloaded eBooks, nor does it attempt to automatically generate metadata for them, so they are hard to find in the Journal unless one goes in and manually enters things like title and author for every eBook.
The Read activity does not appear to have any way to suppress the display of the mouse pointer. Which on the XO is a bit on the big and intrusive side.
It seems to behave badly on long PDF documents. This, too, is hard to pin down, but any full-length novels... especially full-length Victorian novels... strain its capability.
Now, I'm sure someone will say "It's open source, so fix it." The honest response I'm too lazy and have other things to do with my spare time, but I will point out that the promise that you could directly view the source of any XO activity directly on the XO itself does not appear to be realized, at least not in the G1G1 as shipped. Nor is it at all clear to me that Pippy, which appears to be the development environment included, would be up to the task of modifying the Read actvity.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Let's say that there's more than one DVD's worth of CC content available. What do you send? I'd say, send it all. Each laptop gets one DVD, but a random one. If you want to hear more music, you collaborate with others who have it handy...
-- Stephen.
They need to learn English anyway to be successful. It's fucked up, but thats how it is. I think its a good way to force English on them...
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I was extremely excited and enthusiastic about the OLPC and the projects (like sugar) that make it innovative and seductive. But now I'm just deeply disappointed in the inability of OLPC to communicate manufacturing/delivery delays, repeated lies from them about when I would get the laptop, and the total refusal to ship to my new New Zealand address when they had plenty of time to ship it to my domestic address if they had kept any of the delivery promises.
My support of the project would've extended to presenting it at the private international school in Miami that I was on the board of (and where my son would've used it). Since I've now moved out to New Zealand, I would've also done my best to proselytise at his new school, also filled with a good mix of prominent people who might've become supports of the project. Instead, their failures to deliver and to communicate their delays has gone well beyond simple frustration and made me suspicious of their ability to pull it off. They finally set up a phone number one could call a couple weeks ago, but only as an 800#, which I couldn't call from outside the US! Once I got back in the states, in response to my repeated emails and phone calls last week I was told timeframes ranging from "asbolutely mid March" to "probably 45-60 days" depending on who at OLPC was spinning the tale.
As a person who has been involved in the computer industry for 30 years, I'm well aware of problems with manufacturing and shipping a new product, but I have never seen such a poorly handled situation. I was very excited and enthusiastic about the OLPC project and more than willing to support it and proselytize. My purchase/donation was a sign of my support, and I intended to prominently display the laptop at my son's schools to motivate more support for the project. The lack of communication and lies about the status has not only disappointed me, it has really soured me on the project and caused me to also withdraw my donation, something I've never done in my life. No matter how innovative and seductive a product, if you can't actually make it available you're just wasting your time.
-a.e.mossberg