A great course for listening in on (or viewing!): InfoSys 296A-2 / Law276.8 Open Source Development and Distribution of Digital Information: Technical, Economic, Social, and Legal Perspectives | Fall 2006, from the Berkeley open educational resource collection.
Thanks for the link! Between the intro talk about due assignments, and the background noise of the band, some interesting points are made. How much more enjoyable listening to lectures this way than having to sit through them (I can skip past the parts I don’t care about, and rewind and relisten to interesting parts).
An interesting quote:
“The whole art [to an open source business model] is in attempting to draw a line in a way that builds you a huge installed base and leaves you plenty of room on top of that for people who want things on top of that. I think the art is if you can segment your customers to understand that certain customers have needs that are different than the mainstream of customers. The issue on the other side though, is that maybe someone is going to provide an equivalent open source solution to the advanced features that you are providing, do there is never any rest.” (from Open Source Business Models around minute 101)
Now that I’ve written this, I guess this is obvious and I’ve heard that message in much of what I’ve read before about open source, but it seemed especially salient when I heard it now.
Thanks for pointing this out. I wrote a couple words about it on my site. I’ve been thinking lately about how we might be able to use the forces that drive people to contribute to things like Wikis to make instruction more engaging (though that’s not what I posted about).
Jay