But I put it nonetheless in a recent Page Too section of the implications of the recent Millersville case --
And today I find a fascinating but all, all, too brief interview snippet with Eben Moglen, an attorney with The Software Freedom Law Foundation. The nominal subject is the recent Blackboard patent bullying, but his statement of the historical background and its implications for the future are another take:
The problem presented for the university professor or graduate student
who wants to work in an open environment is that the university has
been closing itself for a generation now... [F]aculty have therefore increasingly found themselves bit by
bit living within a system which treated their activities, traditional
activities in the spread of knowledge on free terms within a university
structure, increasingly serving a rather different purpose.
Mary Grush, "The American University and the Ownership of Ideas," Campus Technology, 5/9/2007
And as I mentioned before, that "rather different purpose" entails closing off the freedoms of speech and ownership of intellectual property of those in the University community to assign it to the University-as- Corporation.
Page Too
But the above historical analysis implies an inherent antagonism, and we do see it everywhere apparent in the confusions surrounding the planning and management of technology in academia: the contradictory desire to both control all internally produced intellectual resources of the University-as-Corporation, while at the same time lowering costs by using and exploiting as cheaply as possible the intellectual assets of others; a.k.a, "we want to be paid for our stuff, but use your stuff for free."
- Are these not the wings upon which Open Source software has made its entrée to higher education ?
- Don't its advocates convince eduministration that we can then make proprietary additions to it and give away for free as marketing gimmick or perhaps even charge for it ?
- And of couse isn't the cost factor the one that anti-OpenSource FUD exploits: the long term hidden costs of support ?
Fascinating to see the roots of the Open Source versus Proprietary Source debate framed inside the historical process of the closure of American academia.
Indeed, is this not also a contributor to wikiphobia in academe?
Yes. I clearly recall the words of Don Wyatt of Middlebury on this subject: Why should faculty devote their time to something like Wikis and Wikipedia when there is no academic reward for it?
In other words, why give away knowledge for free?
Or software either?
Um, because it works ?
