Free Software Linux

From an Op-Ed in the June 1 online edition of the NY Times by Brian Greene: Put a Little Science in Your Life The entire piece is worth the read. If you are pressed for time and need to choose between reading this blog post and the article, choose the article. Some excerpts that struck me as particularly relevant:

This is moving in the right direction - towards *all* knowledge, freely online for *everyone* to use in *any* way - rather like free software: Darwin's private papers online - the largest publication of Darwin's papers in history. Read about it here. Browse the papers here. This site contains Darwin's complete publications, thousands of handwritten manuscripts and the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue ever published; [Click to enlarge] also hundreds of supplementary works: biographies, obituaries, reviews, reference works and more. Almost all is online only here: such as 1st editions of Voyage of the Beagle, Zoology, Descent of Man, all editions of Origin of Species (1st, 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th & 6th); important manuscripts: Beagle Diary & field notebooks, Journal, transmutation notebooks and Autobiography. Forthcoming: more editions, translations, introductions & manuscripts. But:

Well, there's this call for affordable textbooks, including open textbooks: One thousand professors from over 300 colleges in all 50 states released a statement today declaring their preference for high-quality, affordable textbooks, including open textbooks, over expensive commercial textbooks. Open textbooks are complete, reviewed textbooks written by academics that can be used online at no cost and printed for a small cost. What sets them apart from conventional textbooks is their open license, which allows instructors and students flexibility to use, customize and print the textbook. Open textbooks are already used at some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions - including Harvard, Caltech and Yale - and the nation’s largest institutions - including the California community colleges and the Arizona State University system.

Interesting: KDE e.V and Wikimedia Deutschland have opened a shared office in Frankfurt, Germany. As two organizations that share similar goals and organizational challenges, they hope that working out of the same space will strengthen and expand their links to the Free Culture community, as well as allowing them to share resources, experience and infrastructure.

Interesting: KDE e.V and Wikimedia Deutschland have opened a shared office in Frankfurt, Germany. As two organizations that share similar goals and organizational challenges, they hope that working out of the same space will strengthen and expand their links to the Free Culture community, as well as allowing them to share resources, experience and infrastructure.

I just came across this tool for Mediawiki: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Send2Wiki This extends the possibilities for using mediawiki as a remixing engine for open content repositories that are otherwise closed. I particularly like the pdf to wiki functionality. A tool like Send2wiki, combined with the WikiArticleFeeds Extension to generate RSS feeds for republishing/reorganizing in an open content repository would allow a great deal of flexibility for creating and remixing open content.