Re: [OS:N:] Reply to multiple posts at once

James Michael DuPont <[email protected]> wrote:

>>
Ok, so you see no other way to pay for your morgage than to take away
the rights of the students to view the source code of the software and
make other viewing tools? I think the issue is boiling down to that
fact that the courseware distribution is not compatible with free
software at all.
<<

James, once again, read my lips: there is no "right" to view source code.
Individual authors may grant you that right, but it's a privilege, not a
natural, God-given or legal right. The original author has the right to
decide whether he will release the source or not.

>>
So in order to protect your IP, you need to make other use non-free
software, closed file formats and bind them to the EULA, all so you can
make your money?
<<

You have to do *something*. And yes, flthy lucre, "my" money. It's earned
by the sweat of my brow, and goes to paying for trombone lessons for my
son, a computer for my daughter, and other venal delights.

My experience as a course developer and instructor is that people will
attempt to take my work and resell it as their own. If I was to put the
entire content of my current courses up on my web site I am in *no doubt*
that I would soon have competitors using it to sell against me, at lower
cost, since they wouldn't have any development costs. I have had attendees
from colleges and universities attend my courses and frankly admit that
they are there to learn how to teach a similar course for their
institution. Since my customers are corporate/enterprise, and their
students are young people, I let that slide. I've had a major consulting
firm reprint my course material - just run it through the photocopier - for
their staff and sale to their customers. I didn't let that slide. I've had
other contract lecturers tape-record every word I've uttered. Am I getting
through here?

If I was in the distance education or courseware distribution business, I'm
pretty certain that I would use a copy protection or licensing scheme based
on public-key cryptography. To answer your final point, that probably could
be done using free, open-source software; it's a fundamental tenet of
information security that the security must depend on the strength of the
key, not the algorithm, and so using an open-source implementation of a
publicly-documented crypto algorithm would not cause any problem. However,
that's just a technical side-line.

To come back to the fundamental issue: the rights of the student. The
student has the following rights, as I see it:

*     the right to the education/training material and the
information/knowedge contained therein
*     an assurance as to the correctness of the material

and that's about it. When you buy a book, do you demand to know how it was
printed? When you listen to a lecture on the radio, do you demand a circuit
diagram of the radio station's transmitter? Why then should you imagine
that you have the right to the source code of some other delivery
mechanism?

If you are saying that education should be as widely available as possible,
why then I applaud your efforts. Only this weekend, I complained (in
person) to a company that their web page rendered unreadably in Mozilla and
Netscape, and was told that if I didn't use Internet Explorer, that was
*my* problem. Oh, well, they're nice people otherwise, just misguided, so
I'll keep trying to educate them. Rather like I'm trying to educate you . .
. umm . .err. . . <g>

I'm sure that Red Hat would prefer to use open-source software for delivery
of content wherever possible, but at the expense of educational
effectiveness? Where the software they choose is free, albeit not Free?
Where's the beef? It's all very well to be idealistic, but it is possible
to cut off your nose to spite your face, as they say. Now, if Red Hat
required students to run Windows. . . .

Best,

--- Les Bell, RHCE, CISSP
[http://www.lesbell.com.au]



_______________________________________________
Subscription and Archive: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/open-source-now-list/
-
For K12OS technical help join K12OSN:
<https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/k12osn>