I am still reading about USA in the 1960s or thereabouts, currently about the
Diggers, a revolutionary group centred in Haight, who re distributed everything
free, food, even money. I wonder did Bear get inspiration from teh Diggers and
SDS and etc

Although I acknowledge Richards caution, it does seem to be at odds with UAI
and etc.

I think that we can overcome controls by acting collectively in the best
interests of the widest community. However, Cardiff Unniversity have recently
made the same claims, and have said that anything that is constructed in
university time belongs to them. Just let them try to claim it...

Currently in Germany having great time with EAMB!

Love Fran

--- bear <tc_spirit@...> wrote:

>
> Richard, et. al.
>
> I think the points you raise are critically important and worthy of
> much discussion and debate. More so, I am delighted to so engage and
> want to encourage others to share their thoughts about the issues
> involved. So first I will share what MIT succinctly states on their
> open courseware site and then I will respond from my own narrow, though
> loquacious view... Of course my ideas may change in the process of free
> flowing appraisal and challenge by others. Of course, that is really
> the intent of the nurse-educator project, so in a way - I can't
> possibly lose. The only thing people can freely choose to do is 'not
> participate' by not opening emails or not sharing their thoughts...
>
> MIT: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/about-ocw.htm
>
> MIT OCW is a large-scale, Web-based electronic publishing initiative
> funded jointly by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew
> W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT.
>
> MIT OCW's goals are to:
>
> * Provide free, searchable, access to MIT's course materials for
> educators, students, and self-learners around the world.
> * Extend the reach and impact of MIT OCW and the "opencourseware"
> concept.
>
> MIT OCW would not be possible without the support and generosity of the
> MIT faculty who choose to share their research, pedagogy, and knowledge
> to benefit others. We expect MIT OCW to reach a steady - though never
> static - state by 2008. Between now and then, we will publish the
> materials from virtually all of MIT's undergraduate and graduate
> courses.
>
> We will be continually evaluating the Access, Use, and Impact of MIT
> OCW over the course of the next five years. With 900 courses published
> as of September 2004, we are still in a learning stage of this MIT
> initiative and we will benefit enormously from your feedback, as we
> strive to make MIT OCW as rich and useful as possible for our users.
>
> Bear's positions:
>
> I understand the tendency for some institutions to try to commoditize
> knowledge - I just don't respect it very much. I see it as an
> anachronistic and retrogressive development in higher education and I
> see the nurse-educator project as an alternative to it. I think that
> the development of open source software has been, in part, a reclaiming
> by computer programmers of the love for computer programming that the
> commodification of software had significantly damaged. I think the
> parallels between Open Source and proprietary software and what you
> suggest is happening at your own university and to alternative
> opportunity of the nurse-educator initiative are unmistakable. So let's
> consider the analogy.
>
> Long before Bill Gates took the labors of others who had long preceded
> him in the development of computer hardware and software and turned
> their work and a little of his own into copyright protected software,
> tens of thousands of computer scientists, researchers, programmers,
> systems analysts, and users had contributed their love and labor to the
> sharing of better ways of using computers, writing programs, and
> tweaking hardware and software to make it work better. Bill Gates did
> not develop the DOS operating system out of nothing - he used the
> knowledge that had been developed over hundreds of years of
> mathematical, mechanical, and electronic computational research and
> development, put a copyright on it, and then shut everyone else out
> from the underlying code. Gates will often suggest that proprietary
> software spurs innovation, efficiency, and quality but there is
> precious little evidence for that and an awful lot of evidence that the
> real spur to innovation, efficiency, and quality can be seen in the
> GNU/Linux world - the Free Open Source Software movement. I genuinely
> do not begrudge Gates his money – I actually think he has been pretty
> generous with his wealth. How many of us can say there was ever a day
> when we contributed 10 – 25% of our personal wealth to charitable
> endeavors?
>
> What I begrudge is Gates’ somewhat hypocritical appropriation of the
> work of his predecessors and the taking of the fruits of their labors
> and then hiding his relatively modest contributions to the development
> of software from the community that built the launch pad for his very
> modest contributions.
>
> The commodification of intellectual property, such as is occurring in
> many universities, serves not to improve the quality of academic
> environments but to diminish it. The prevention of openness and the
> stifling of the sharing of ideas are quite a bit different than the
> commodification of material products. Ideas do not develop on a time
> clock schedule. Faculty members are employed to do a great many things
> - but thinking, innovating, creating, expressing, and sharing their
> ideas with others is not something that is done in a 40 hour work-week
> or even a 60 hour work-week or an 80 or 100 hour work-week. None of us
> emerged from a Platonic cave and invented language, mathematics,
> caring, and compassion on our own. We are constantly surrounded by
> ideas, our own and other people’s and for those of us lucky enough to
> benefit from (or be cursed by) them we know that we cannot stop them
> from coming, nor can we make them arrive when we are “at work.” Ideas
> have histories, births, lifetimes, and deaths of their own. Ideas
> turned into commodities are not tested against the ideas of others.
> Ideas hidden or protected behind institutional barriers, whether those
> barriers are mechanical, legal, electronic, or social, are ideas that
> never live to the fullness of their potential. They are closed off to
> most and what is worse, the opportunity is lessened that those who
> believe these ideas will correct their beliefs, when they are wrong,
> through sharing their ideas and seeing the mettle of their ideas
> tested, challenged, debated, corrected, and improved upon by others who
> see the world through different lenses.
>
> Far from what I personally believe universities ought to be doing, the
> commodification of ideas, of intellectual work products, and the
> efforts to assert ownership over the tiny fragments of innovation every
> new scholar adds, is the very antithesis of intellectual, social, and
> cultural development. We might ask where we would be if Galileo's ideas
> had successfully been claimed as proprietary property in the Middle
> Ages rather than merely be determined to be biblically errant and
> morally objectionable.
>
> There are a great many of us who either do not seek or do not succeed
> in commodifying the ideas we have. As you look around the web you see
> millions of people sharing their ideas freely. Universities can either
> follow in the footsteps of MIT by sharing their knowledge with humanity
> or they can retreat into a Dark Ages mentality, trying to preserve the
> illusion that preserving the right to charge for academic credits and
> degrees is somehow equivalent to competing successfully in the
> educational process, market place, or maintaining “Academic Freedom.”
> MIT it appears is not afraid that they will lose student revenues
> because they put their course materials online so that anyone can
> learn. Just a guess here - but who do you (and others) think will still
> have willing students 20 years from now - MIT or institutions that hide
> their potential contributions to humanity behind electronic walls
> crafted by Blackboard and WebCT?
>
> At best, I think, the claims being made by universities that they are
> the rightful owners of intellectual property are probably based on the
> discredited assumptions of, but actually little like, and nowhere near
> as credible, as the claims of plantation owners to the work products of
> slaves and indentured servants or sweat shop owner’s claims to the work
> products of piece workers. Universities do not create the climates in
> which ideas develop – they merely provide space for activities that
> suit their purposes – like attending meetings, counseling and advising
> students, and working on university projects. Universities don’t
> control our participation on listservers and cannot prevent our sharing
> our ideas in letters, on the phone, in journals, or in emails. If we
> accept that universities own our intellectual products than we ought,
> to be consistent, ask for permission to publish our work in any venue
> at all. Once seen through that particular lens, I think most of us are
> unwilling to extend to some bureaucrat with no disciplinary knowledge
> whatsoever, the right to control where we publish our work. Why should
> an article be any different than a presentation for class? If we accept
> that the university owns our work products and we have a duty to convey
> those work products upon our departure, which among us can carry on
> with our work? Which of our ideas are we entitled to use in the future?
> If I consult as a statistician as part of my university work – am I
> obliged to never do statistics again once I leave that university
> because doing so may trample on their rights to appropriate my
> knowledge?
>
> Now, to more directly discuss the specific issue you raise and to offer
> what I believe to be a viable alternative to allowing our work products
> to be controlled by petty university bureaucrats. Make no mistake about
> it – the calls for commodification of intellectual property are not
> being made by creative and independent thinkers, they are being made by
> poorly socialized, inadequately educated, and narrow-minded,
> bureaucrats using an idea as old as humankind – appropriate someone
> else’s work as your own to make yourself look as though you were a
> contributor.
>
> First, let’s address some of the issues that these bureaucrats think
> entitles them to press such claims. If your ideas are, in fact,
> developed solely in your university office, on university owned
> equipment, and stored on university owned computers they may have a
> limited, a very limited, claim that their participation was significant
> in the genesis and development of those ideas. That, for example, is
> why ALL my writing, course material development, presentations, and
> intellectual products are created on my own equipment with my own
> software, and in my own home. I simply refuse to use university owned
> and delegated equipment or software for my use when developing my
> intellectual work products. I would still argue that any claims by any
> university that they provided the tools for intellectual property
> development are, at best, flimsy and weak. But using your own resources
> exclusively for development and the university’s resources for nothing
> more than presentation of ‘finished’ intellectual property is certainly
> an appropriate response.
>
> Second, how can the open source nurse-educator project help
> academicians caught in this jam? The first thing to understand is that
> the nurse-educator project is the antithesis of university ownership of
> intellectual property. The GNU Public License states very clearly that
> nobody has the right to appropriate the materials donated. Everyone has
> an unquestioned right to use and modify the materials that would be
> housed on site. Once donated, the materials are available for everyone
> to look at, examine, use in their own teaching, and they are free to
> re-distribute that material as long as their efforts to redistribute it
> do not lead to commodification or claims of ownership by any party. The
> GPL has been getting tested in the courts and it has fared quite well
> against claims by proprietary entities seeking to convert Open Source
> software to private ownership.
>
> So, let’s assume that you access materials from the nurse-educator
> site, add additional materials to them, and use them in class. By
> having any of the original nurse-educator site materials in those
> materials, both you, and your university, are bound by the GPL not to
> attempt to assert ownership over them. The university has an
>
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