Saylor Foundation Awards Prizes To Free College Textbooks

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday February 7, 2012 @10:15AM from the price-is-right dept.

Brad Lucier writes "The Saylor Foundation has a vision: Free and open materials for a complete undergraduate university education. To that end, they've announced the first winners in their Open Textbook Challenge: Four textbooks were relicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC-BY 3.0) Unported license, the most open of the CC licenses, and in return the authors were awarded a prize of $20,000 for each book. See the blog entries and the accompanying press releases for details. The second wave of submissions will be accepted until May 31, 2012."

1 of 75 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Free? by BasilBrush · 2012-02-07 11:02 · Score: 4, Insightful

I'm all for text-books being free. So long as the academic that wrote it was somehow paid at a suitable rate for the time he spent creating it.
A competition tends to mean X people create a work, and X-1 people don't get paid anything for that work. Its a morally vacuous way of getting work done on the cheap, whilst wasting most peoples time. It's neither socialist nor capitalist, but more closely fits slavery.