Articles About Free Books
Download 95.92 Kb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Do Technical Problems Prevent Open-Source Books
Do We Need Open Source?Maybe that sounds like a criticism, but I don't intend it that way. My own book, although free, isn't even source-available, much less open-source. (This is mainly because of certain technical and economic issues discussed below.) But the open-source software model is designed to solve some real problems. For example, open-software licenses and culture are designed to prevent the problems that can arise when different people's software has to be put together in one package, e.g. to make sure that Linux can't be stopped dead in its tracks because some critical part of it turns out to be patented. The BTOL, on the other hand, might be difficult to publish as a single, bound book, because the individual authors own the copyrights on their own chapters, and there is no licensing agreement. An important insight of the inventors of open source was that copyrighted information with a carefully designed licensing agreement (a "copyleft") is in some sense more free than either copyrighted information or uncopyrighted information.[12]. Do authors even want other people to be able to modify what they wrote? Although software and books are not perfectly analogous, I feel that this particular concern about applying open-source methods to books is based on a misunderstanding of what open source is. While open-source software licenses do guarantee anyone the right to modify the program, they do not guarantee that those modifications will become standard or widespread. I could, for example, fiddle around with the delicate inner workings of my own copy of the Linux kernel, most likely breaking it due to my deficient programming skills. But I simply would not be allowed to tinker with the version everyone else depends on until I had proven my transcendent programming talents to a very critical cadre of the world's most fanatical software geeks. Nobody was ever able to force Linus Torvalds to take his Linux project in a direction he didn't want, because he owned the copyrights to its vital parts. The open-source approach allows the project's originator to exert whatever degree of control she/he deems appropriate. If I want to limit other people's contributions to my book severely, so that they can only report errata and provide supplements and add-ons, I can do that (although an approach that strict would probably not inspire very many people to participate). When it comes to sharing the pen, "if" and "how much" are up to the author, but a more interesting question is "how?" What legal and cultural framework will work? Are open-source software methods directly applicable? The BTOL collaboration, for instance, has an original take on this. Writes Victor Bloomfield, "It is important, of course, to maintain the integrity of each author's chapter (closed source). However, the volume editor can choose to include more than one treatment of the same material (semi-open source)." It's also not hard to imagine creative projects that would be impossible with a closed-source model. In my field, for example, the phenomenon of textbook bloat is particularly out of control when it comes to the number of homework problems at the end of each chapter. One of the main things that deterred me from shopping my book around to the traditional- style publishers was knowing that I would be expected to crank out roughly a thousand additional homework problems in addition to the few hundred I'd already written. Writing homework problems is an activity that can be done in parallel by many people, and a stockpile of problems on the web would be a valuable resource for every teacher in the field. In fact, quite a few physics teachers already have their own individual collections on the web. A more general collection would also fit well with the collaborative approach used in open-source software, since there is no need to maintain a consistent authorial voice, and the bug-finding philosophy of the open-source software movement is applicable: homework problems can have bugs, people can usually agree on what constitutes a bug, bugs are hard to find, and bug-finding can be done in parallel by many people. (Incidentally, when publishers kill off the used book market by bringing out gratuitous new editions, one of their standard techniques for creating incompatibility between editions is to fiddle with the homework problems. Having a public collection on the web might help to eliminate this particular dysfunctional behavior.) Another possible application of the open-source paradigm to textbooks would be the creation of sets of notes on applications. In physics, for example, ideas about torque and angular momentum can be applied to martial arts and gymnastics, but I simply don't have the expertise to write anything interesting on these topics. The availability of such a set of resources online would help to reduce textbook bloat, and would also allow students to read about applications that truly interest them. Likewise, scientists who lament the sparseness of applications in math textbooks could be invited to contribute applications themselves. Do Technical Problems Prevent Open-Source Books?Unfortunately going open-source isn't as simple as just adopting an open-source license. As I toyed with the idea of open-sourcing my own book, and then began to study how other people were doing things, it became clear that there were some serious technical hurdles. Imagine that Linus Torvalds was trying to get the Linux collaboration off the ground, but none of the prospective partners used the same computer language. This is pretty much the situation with desktop publishing software. Quark Express and PageMaker are the most popular packages for laying out books, at least among professionals, but they are very expensive and not fully interoperable. Quite a few physicists and mathematicians know LaTeX, but it's far from being a universal standard, and it does not allow the kind of control that is necessary for a book with a complex layout and lots of illustrations. (To be fair, many LaTeX users would consider this a feature, not a bug, since it results from the philosophy of separating form from content.) The true lingua francas are word-processor formats. Victor Bloomfield of the BTOL project writes, "Authors typically send word-processing (most commonly Word, but others as well) and graphics files. It is indeed a hassle..." The sheer amount of work involved in getting a book ready for open-sourcing has also deterred authors like Jim Hefferon and me. A more subtle problem is that except for LaTeX, none of these formats lend themselves to communal editing. The open-source software community uses a program called CVS (Concurrent Version System) to allow people within a trusted community to change and edit the files from a large software project, and to resolve conflicts that occur when two people are simultaneously working on the same file. CVS can be used for any kind of plain-text, human-editable files, not just computer programs, but it can't be used with files from any of the popular word processors or desktop publishing programs, since they're all in binary formats. Directory: uploads -> STU uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! STU -> Politics in the 1920’s Conservatism, Dominance of the Republican Party Conservatism Download 95.92 Kb. Share with your friends:
|