Open Source Helps Education Effort in Third World
"It's about money, at the end of the day, because we're in Africa," says one service provider, and that about sums it up. When developing nations look at the cost of open source software - nothing - and the ongoing costs created by proprietary software, there is really no choice. More...

The Iron Fist, The Invisible Hand, And The Battle For The Soul of Open Source
Bruce Sterling warns, "The denizens of Open Cultures want their connected collectivism to liberate the world from regulations, markets, and intellectual property. But what if victory only clears the way for corruption of their beloved culture?" But aside from the limp observation that a gangster won't be receiving any money for recording an average album, I don't see the grim consequences here. More...

MIT Everyware
This light read documents the impact of MITs Open CopurseWare project through the eyes of its users in the developing world. The 'Top 10' list of courses at the end of the article is fun. Leading the list? A philosophy course. More...

Open Access, Content, Publishing, Learning
Web Tools newsletter steps right up to the mark this week with coverage of open access content and publishing. The coverage begins, naturally, with Creative Commons but runs the gamut, beginning with a historical perspective (including some important work by Sam Williams and George Siemens) and looking at some major contemporary arguments. More...

LOM/CanCore Open-Source Software Components Released
CITIS summary of recently released software components from CanCore which designed to provide the building blocks for a digital library. Though you would never know it by reading this article, these components were developed at Athabasca University as a part of the eduSource project (and were the subject of a great deal of discussion and wrangling by the wider eduSource development team) and will be soon joined by a wider range of applications and tools (why they were attributed to CanCore is a bit of a mystery). More...

The Quiet War Over Open-Source
In a quiet behind-the-scenes battle, U.S. government officials - prodded by Microsoft - squelched a proposed World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) meeting on open source. There is already a wide perception that these international bodies respond like puppies to the corporate sector, and WIPO's acquiescence on this issue doesn't improve that image. More...

Sharing the Code
Good article discussing the range of considerations faced by college and university administrators when considering whether to deploy open source software. Though the article raises the usual issues - such as the expertise required to manage open source software - it also raises some less widely noted points, such as the strong support open source software users can get from the user community. More...

IMS and OKI, the Wire and the Socket
Description of progress in MIT's Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI). It is important to recognize, reports the author, that OKI is not an open source learning environment. Nor is it even an architecture, though as the author note, OKI's layer-cake archietcture has become famous. More...

Open Source Takes on Exchange
Microsoft's grip on the corporate and academic market has always been anchored by the Exchange Server, that bloated and generally useless piece of software that combines email, calendar and file sharing services. More...

SPARC Open Access Newsletter
Peter Suber, who until last September published the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) news regularly, is now able to devote much more time to the same enterprise after obtaining support from SPARC. Additionally, he maintains the Open Access News blog, which has just changed its name from FOS News. More...