Normally I don't argue politics, but I'm surprised that the agenda I most liked the new administration for - namely, their approach on technology and the media - is actually being followed through on. What am I talking about? Open source, of course!

Open source textbooks, specifically. Check out this bill, introduced yesterday (September 30th) in the Senate. Its name: the Open College Textbook Act of 2009. Let's highlight some of the important parts. Namely, Section 5 of the bill -- the licensing:

(a) In General- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, educational materials such as curricula and textbooks created through grants distributed by Federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, for use in elementary, secondary, or postsecondary courses shall be licensed under an open license.

(b) Accessibility- The full and complete digital content of each of the materials created as described in subsection (a) shall be--

(1) posted on an easily accessible and interoperable website, which site shall be identified to the Secretary by the grant recipient; and

(2) made available free of charge to, and may be downloaded, redistributed, changed, revised, or otherwise altered by, any member of the general public.

In short, open source books! Free to students! Free to modify to make better, etc.

Now, before conservatives get a stick up their behind regarding this being bad for business, Section 5 only applies to materials created using one of the grants won from the NSF. And, since the NSF is a government agency, it means that the money is coming out of the taxpayer's wallet in the end. This would be adding a middleman to the process of "person pays company for product", revising the process to "person pays middleman to pay company that makes the best product, then person gets product". A little convoluted, but with proper transparency in place, it should result in high quality open source school materials.

Now, one may argue that the government butting in to education like this could result in unbalanced funding of different points of view. But, say a really good textbook is produced, but the author believed in intelligent design. The author wins the NSF grant, and uses it to write and publish his book. Complaints arise from evolutionists, creationists, and pastafarians everywhere. But! The book is open source. A dedicated evolutionist could very easily take it and edit it and publish a "hard science only" version. In open source, derivatives are encouraged.

As is cake.

Now, what made me aware of this bill is actually another blog post which is critical of the bill, giving an example of his publishing company:

I don't know if Pearson can still make money if a percentage of their market decides to simply deal with the PDF and Pearson can only sell to those who don't trust the author's website or who want hardcopy.

Okay, so let's look at this logically. Publishing companies arose because as time progressed, information was a more and more valuable resource. Such a resource needed to be distributed, and just as a lumberjack can't log all the lumber to where it's needed (haha get the pun?), authors could not print enough or make themselves well enough known without the aid of some helper entity. In the present day, communication has become ubiquitous everywhere the Internet is present.

The advent of cars made carriage manufacturers go broke, and the advances in flight have (sort of) obsoleted passenger crossing the Atlantic by ship, and all that will probably be trashed once teleportation is discovered. New technology, innovations, and inventions are destructive just as constructive as they can be. As new businesses are created, old ones die.

You won't find any punch card operators anymore!

If Pearson seriously depends on distribution of hard copies of books that much, then it's about to learn (or is learning) the same hard lesson that journalists and newspapers are learning: the web is more efficient and you can't stop that.

Seriously.

Note: If anyone is curious as to what an open source book is, check this one out: http://www.openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english2e/ And learn some Python while you're there, too.