I forgot to mention in my previous entry about the Open University’s fabulous $10M Open Content Intiative that the very first highly concrete proposal for exactly this concept came from Richard Stallman, aka RMS, back in 1994.
RMS sought to approach the top management of The Open University, via an email to me*, proposing very radical ideas along the lines of what we now know as OCI, the Open Content Intiative. There was some to-ing and fro-ing around the original idea, and now it’s clear that the ‘planets are properly aligned’, as they say: the mood is right, the timing is right, the technology is right, the research and funding models are right, and most significantly the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation have provided the all-important kick-start funding to The Open University to make it happen.
[*Not that we really knew each other - he had kindly given me a magnetic tape (!!) with a full EMACS insallation for a PDP-10 when I stumbled into his office at MIT some 20 years earlier ... wonder what the FOAF representation of that is?]
Technorati Tags: open.content, rms, stallman, gnu, free.software, EMACS, fsf, open.university, OCI
