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Open Sourcing - what next?

After talking to quite a few people about my idea of open sourcing the course materials for my Rails course I decided to go ahead and just do it. The advantages outweigh the drawbacks as far as I can see them:

Advantages

  • Giving something back to the community -> Good karma
  • Having other people look over the documents could lead to ideas for improvement (what Scoble has had happen to his “Naked Conversations” book)
  • Having other people actually see that I’m doing something (Cory Doctorow commented that he was more worried about obscurity, than about people downloading his books)
  • Showing potential customers about what they can expect from the course

Drawbacks

  • Someone might use my materials fro their own course without attribution / proper licensing

I think the advantages far outweigh the drawbacks, so now I’m working on making this happen. I have to decide on a license and how best to share my work.

Technorati Tags: opensource, rubyonrails, training

Jens-Christian Fischer

Maker. Musician