Open Courseware vs. Open Source Software - A Critical Comparison

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently announced its OpenCourseWare project, which will make all its courseware available on the Internet free of charge. This paper compares the OpenCourseWare project to the open source approach of software development. It contrasts and evaluates the nature of the products, the motives of the producers and users, the consequences on the market environment and the contribution to the scientific progress. Besides exploring the specific MIT case, another motivation of the paper is to stimulate the academic discussion about new regimes for dealing with digital courseware