Popular open source news - Non Software

University of Toronto biochemist Aled Edwards has been one of the leading champions of the open-source research movement in drug development. And he has some interesting numbers to back up his calls for a revolution in research.

By any measure, MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative, which seeks to "open source" education by making course ware from premier institutions available online to all for free, is a success.

Hiran has created a nice font called Rufscript based on the handwriting of someone he knows. What is more important is that the font is available under GPLv3 with font exception.

Marc works with an initiative that seeks to make biological and genomic data open and available such that anyone can go play with it and form communities around working with this data. The hope is that by having data freely available people there will be many more people working with the data and thus more leads into potential therapies and cures.

Through illuminating examples like his calculation that Wikipedia was created in about the same amount of time that Americans spend watching commercials each weekend, Shirky argues that humans in the post-industrial age are just coming to terms with how to spend their "cognitive surplus."

Textbooks with open licenses are complete, scholarly college texts written by the same type of people writing traditional books, but these books have a twist. They've been placed online with the author's permission under an open license that allows students and instructors to read, print and even customize the text for free or a small fee.