It is that time of year when google starts taking applications for GSoC. The Google Summer of Code is a neat idea, really: pay a bunch of students enough to live on for the summer in exchange for them contributing to open source software. While the aim is very different, GSoC remindes me of how REUs work. This got me thinking...

Consider how science and technology work. Some talented person(s) is passionate enough about his science to pursue it at great costs. I'd even venture that most of us would do it "for free" as long as we had some way to get by. Secondly, companies realize that advances in science can turn into profits and so they fund research. Finally, the government also appreciates -- well maybe not as much as it should -- the value that science holds for the general public and for the government itself and thus funds research through agencies. The role of the agencies is to determine what is the overall direction that science should be taking and to administer the funds. Researches write proposals and get grants. People go to work.

Open source software isn't much different. Some talented hacker(s) is passionate enough about her hacking to pursue it at great costs and in her spare time. I'd venture most hackers would do it "for free" as long as they had some way to get by. Companies realize the value of this and they fund open source development (GSoC, IBM and eclipse, MySQL, etc). Finally, the government -- oh no, wait, the government is largely missing from the picture.

If google finds it worthwhile to fund REUs, why is it that the government does not find it worthwhile to fund open source at a larger scale? The general public -- whether they realize it or not -- benefits from the existence of open source projects. The internet exists because of open source. Secondly, the government itself will sooner or later wake up and adopt open source technologies for its own needs like those of Germany, The Netherlands, and Brazil which have already begun doing this. The potential agency should work much the same way the NSF does: determine overall direction and administer funds. Hackers write proposals and get grants. People go to work. The agency does not even need to be separate from the NSF. It just seems that there needs to be a way to make a proposal to build something and get the government to finance your efforts so long they are for "the greater good". Just like science. Only that hackers, unlike most scientists, don't need any expensive equipment other than a laptop.

The lack of posts is Jackson's fault.

The overly inactive open-source revolutionary in me spoke the words 'if you ever write a textbook, please make it free' to two different professors this week. Should books be free like Linux is free? Yes, they should. Of course, printing costs are a reasonable thing to charge for and the author's time also has monetary value (which open-source software authors are usually willing to forfeit as probably would some academics). As it is there exist plenty free 'text books' online. Don't believe me? Check this out. Online books are nice, but if you are going to be doing a fair amount of reading it is actually nice to have a reasonable quality hard copy. So, my rough sketch of a solution is to create a 'publishing' company that operates as follows.

Books are made available online for free or for minimal cost (to break even in terms of hosting). People can then order printed copies of the books for an additional cost to cover printing expenses. This is all organized through a web-site... duh, it is me coming up with it, right?

This has its logistical fallacies: it is probably a lot cheaper to print several thousand copies of a book than printing them 'on demand'. But with reasonable popularity measures and printing practices the logistic problems could perhaps be made into manageable ones. EDIT: Doing about 10 minutes worth of research into publishing costs revealed to me that one can expect to get a paperback quality book published for $5-20 per copy depending on the number of copies. This definitely makes the idea plausible.

Now we can take this to a whole new level. Imagine web-book 2.0. Users can register and have reviews, rankings and recommendations for books. Perhaps one can allow users to upload materials and have the system keep track of what items are related in one way or another. As the number of books and users grow the costs would probably do so as well, but I think that a non-for-profit spirit plus some creativity in ways to earn revenue could make ends meet. For instance, printed books could be sold at a price slightly higher than cost as to cover the other expenses of the site. Or perhaps users could pay a yearly membership fee.

Now a bit of due credit. Zack had a variation of this idea several years ago and it has been in the back of my head since then.

The main problem with all this is that for whatever reason the books that are available for free online are rarely as good as the overpriced published ones. I can think of several possible reasons why this is so, but whatever. In any event, my generation might have just gotten fed up enough with new editions that merely shuffle problems around and price tags over $100 to start producing reasonably good content that can be made available in a non-profit manner. I say it is the duty of our generation to start by writing a better e&m; book.

Viva la Linux revolucion!