Materials from the Free Technology Academy

[Posted February 3, 2010 by corbet]

The Free Technology Academy, a "virtual university" with support from the European Commission, has announced that it has made a set of free-software-related educational materials available under the CC ShareAlike and GNU FDL licenses. Available books include The concepts of free software and open standards (291 pages) and GNU/Linux advanced administration (545 pages). Both books are available in English, Spanish and Catalan.

Materials from the Free Technology Academy

Posted Feb 3, 2010 17:31 UTC (Wed) by sourcejedi (guest, #45153) [Link] (1 responses)

That's weird, it seems to be CC-SA but released as PDF only.

I can understand the idea of "download only, no browsing", but not "download typeset output only". And I can't believe that's compatible with the GFDL, which it is dual-licensed under.

/search GFDL

"If you publish or distribute Opaque copies of the Document numbering more than 100, you must either include a machine-readable Transparent copy"

"A "Transparent" copy of the Document means a machine-readable copy, represented in a format whose specification is available to the general public, that is suitable for revising the document straightforwardly with generic text editors or (for images composed of pixels) generic paint programs or (for drawings) some widely available drawing editor, and that is suitable for input to text formatters or for automatic translation to a variety of formats suitable for input to text formatters."

Materials from the Free Technology Academy

Posted Feb 4, 2010 17:14 UTC (Thu) by david.jaco (guest, #43954) [Link]

The materials were released in PDF because that was the only open standard format under which they were available at the moment. They will soon be released in SCORM (the format in which they're used internally at the FTA). Also, different collaboration tools are being considered to allow for contributions & corrections.

Cheers,
David