[Marketing] Mixing Free Software and Free + Proprietary content. A case study

[Sean DALY]

I personally am opposed to DRM. I feel the proper protection of
copyrighted works should be in copyright law, not technical measures.
In my experience, DRM doesn't slow down anyone technically competent
who wants the content, while driving ordinary users nuts and diverting
engineering and coordination resources better used on more important
work. If openness is impossible, unobtrusive watermarking, or an
advertising splash screen indicating the source, could be compromises
worth investigating.

I am fully cognizant of the importance of remunerating creators,
however there is much evidence to indicate that the traditional
position of publishers as middlemen is likely to shrink if not
disappear in the years to come.

There is a vast amount of freely available content and we are only at
the beginning of building Creative Commons licensed curricula supports
through communities. For my part I feel it would be better in the long
term to work towards that goal, rather than trying to implement
everybody and their cousin's DRM schemes, especially those with
significant overhead (server resources, Internet connectivity, logging
and reporting).

thanks

Sean.



On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 7:41 PM, Tomeu Vizoso<tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> Was this intended to be sent to the marketing list? If I understand
> correctly the issue, we need to decide up to which point Sugar Labs is
> going to endorse projects that are based on non-free software and
> content?
>
> If so, I guess it's a good topic for IAEP.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
> 2009/6/11 Caroline Meeks <caroline at solutiongrove.com>:
>> This is a follow up to our discussions about California. I want to expand your experiences around what can be done, but I don't know that we should directly talk about any of this in our letter to CA.
>>
>> One of Solution Grove's clients is Connecticut Center for 21st Century Skills.  They create mixed medium classes for middle and high schools.
>>
>> The classes are run on entirely open source software, Moodle, ELGG for ePortfolios and LAMS for pedagogy support.
>>
>> One of their new products is a complete curriculum for midldle school science. No additional text book required. Its being piloted this year at the Lila Fredrick in Boston.
>>
>> A wonderful master science teacher put it together.  It contains free content from all over the world.  She uses stuff from the NSF and also a lot from the UK.  She also use proprietary interactive lessons from a company called Adaptive Curriculum http://www.adaptivecurriculum.com.
>>
>> There just isn't full coverage out there without some proprietary content
>>
>> The integration was annoying. We had to modify Moodle to interact with their DRM.  http://www.solutiongrove.com/blogger/one-entry?entry_id=1056027
>>
>> Annoying but not really a big deal in the greater scheme of things.  Any of these content vendors will need to have their DRM work with Firefox and likely Moodle. Thus letting kids access it through a Sugar machine vs a MacBook, it shouldn't be that big a deal.
>>
>> I have a big practical side.  To be economical, the class has to replace ALL of a middle school science curriculum.  That can't be done without some proprietary content right now. But by using a great deal of open content, they are encouraging the creation of more open content.  This sort of course is what I want to see. Interesting, interactive, varied material and more affordable then the much less innovate text they are using in the other classes.
>>
>> The problem is, the kids can only use it during class! They can't bring their MacBooks home, not all the kids have netbooks at home, so the teacher can't assign this as homework.  It would be so much better if they were interacting with their teacher during class and with these high quality learning objects at home or at their after school program as homework.
>>
>> Sugar and Sugar on a Stick and Linux on a Stick could make this experience even better, and I think almost all the DRM technical issues would be handled at the server level.  I want the best and most affordable educational materials in the kids hands now. I don't think we should, and I certainly don't think we technically need to, let DRM stand in the way.
>>
>> --
>> Caroline Meeks
>> Solution Grove
>> Caroline at SolutionGrove.com
>>
>> 617-500-3488 - Office
>> 505-213-3268 - Fax
>>
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>>
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