Frequently Asked Questions

Why are you willing to accept any applicant at the University?

Are their any restrictions on who can contribute to the university and who can be members of the faculty?

What is the name of the project?

Well, I currently titled it the Free University Project. This started as the Free University, but then I realized that it's overly agrandized to assume the status of a university, when you currently have little to offer, so a friend suggested instead the benefit of emphasizing that it's really a Project (maybe, "The Journey is the Reward" type of thing). Anyway, in keeping with many of the inspirations for this project coming from Debian, I considered (oh so briefly) a naming scheme a la "Deb(orah) + Ian", but then realized that ludicrous presumptuousness of naming a university after yourself unless 1.) you've died or 2.) you donated hundreds of millions of dollars to start it. However, I think it might just be acceptable to append some catchy acronym in honor of my paternal grandparents, both of whom were public school teachers for much of their lives. The idea would be to find some combination of names that sounds generic yet evokes some cool imagery. If anyone has interesting combinations of the names Estelle Levinson Freedman and Gerald Gimpel Freedman, please email me. Then, it might be the " Free University Project".

What is the licensing for the material?

Short answer: Not decided yet.

Bad part of this: we don't know what the licensing will be. Good part of this: YOU can help determine what the licensing will be (by joining the appropriate working group). The general guidelines are that we want some license that is modelled after the GPL. Now, I'm a big critic of general license proliferation in free-software / open-source software, primarily since it creates confusion and uncertainty over the exact guidelines of a given license. In the software world, I'd be pretty much content with just the GPL-like and BSD-like licenses. However, while early free documentation would just affix a GPL-license to the work, I'm not sure if that's the wisest approach when our project will only be producing written texts (without accompanying code that really belongs under a GPL-license). There are the GNU's Free Documentation License (FDL) and the Open Publication's Open Document License (ODL), but I think the area deserves further consideration before finalizing on some idea. Case in point: the GPL license (and obviously the BSD license) support commercial and non-commercial user of licensed code, and I support this as a central tenet of the DFSG. However, would we want a for-profit education dotcom to carte-blanche copy whatever educational resources we might develop and charge for them? Sure, the GPL would require that they release any modifications to the educational materials under the same license, but isn't it more likely that they'll concentrate on key courses internally developed and kept under proprietary licenses and only supplement their offerings with free materials, without contributing anything back? Or maybe they'll be like notHarvard.com and set up free educational courses strictly as an incentive to push sales of coursebooks? Maybe you guys (meaning those who join the working group) will decide that this is ok, and then so be it, but surely it's something that should at least be considered.

How can I contribute?

The primary ways are by teaching, preparing course materials (books, lecture notes, etc.), helping with advocacy, or joining an appropriate working group (especially if you have experience in a given area / technology). We don't really have any present need for monetary donations (you're welcome to examine our finances), but we'd love to get extra mindshare.

How are you planning to leverage your core competancies in delivering a best-of-breed eServices platform while simultaneously monetizing this disintermediation process?

Excuse me, we don't speak this language (and we're not interested in learning VC-ese) :). We just want this project to be A Good Thing.

How are you planning on making this type of open-community development model work, when you're not producing code that scratches any given developer's very personal and very immediate itch?

See introduction page for a discussion of this issue.