MIT Press Book On Open Source Now Free

eaglemoon writes "MIT Press has released its book Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software as a free PDF download. The book is a collection of research essays covering topics such as open source motivation, economics, business models, software development process and tools, law, and community. Sort of like 'Open Sources' from academics. David Parnas, Larry Lessig, Eric von Hippel, and Clay Shirky are among the contributors."

Direct link to pdf

[LotsOfPhil]

Direct link to pdf [mit.edu]

Re:not to nitpick but...

[garcia]

IMHO, it's certainly not nearly important as them offering OpenCourseWare [mit.edu] to the masses for free.

Re:not to nitpick but...

[morgret]

MIT isn't the only one offering their courses to the masses for free. Many institutions, both K12 and higher ed, have their courses online now. Of those, many have the Creative Commons licenses that can allow for remixing the content. http://www.oercommons.org/oer/oer-providers [oercommons.org] has everything from Free High School Science Texts from South Africa to webcasts from UC Berkeley to MIT's OpenCourseWare, as well as dozens of other sources.

MIT and Openness

[wile_e_wonka]

MIT publishes a magazine called Technology Review [technologyreview.com], which I have been a reader of for some time now. There came a time a few years back when they required a subscription to view online material, much like Scientific American and many other magazines do. This was after the school had begun their OpenCourseWare program, and I thought it seemed contrary to where the school was headed. I emailed the magazine and told them essentially that. I have no idea if my email played a part (I'm sure it was one of many similar emails--Technology Review really is a great magazine (one I'd be willing to pay for if I wasn't so darn poor...I'm a student)). But anyway, within a few days, the content was all freely accessable again.

This is an excellent book...

[cursorx]

I bought this a while back when it was fresh. Some of the articles are very, very good. But a considerable part of the content was already free back then, only not as a part of the book (i.e. the authors themselves had made some of the articles freely available before publication).