Textbooks and the Open-Source Revolution

Those of us with a sense of history can't help but enjoy the irony of Scott McNealy now being a staunch advocate for open-source anything. Nevertheless, this initiative is pretty cool. The hurdle will evidently be curriculum bureaucrats in various governmental departments of education, but what else is new? NYTimes.com:

[Scott] McNealy, the fiery co-founder and former chief executive of Sun Microsystems, shuns basic math textbooks as bloated monstrosities: their price keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same.

“Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,” Mr. McNealy says.

Early this year, Oracle, the database software maker, acquired Sun for $7.4 billion, leaving Mr. McNealy without a job. He has since decided to aim his energy and some money at Curriki, an online hub for free [open-source] textbooks and other course material that he spearheaded six years ago.

“We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks” in the United States, Mr. McNealy says. “It seems to me we could put that all online for free.”...

The nonprofit Curriki fits into an ever-expanding list of organizations that seek to bring the blunt force of Internet economics to bear on the education market. ...