Slashdot Mirror
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."
"the transformation to digital methods of production and distribution therefore poses to the twenty-first century a fundamental moral problem. If I can provide to everyone all goods of intellectual value or beauty, for the same price that I can provide the first copy of those works to anyone, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything?"
Moglen
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
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The OLPC project, with its extremely power-efficient ebook reader mode, attemps to solve the problem of out-of-date textbooks (and no textbooks at all).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
The OLPC laptops are not meant to work in isolation, they are meant to be used in combination with a school server that handles extra content and backup.