Amusing Open Courseware request

Today I received most interesting mail from a training company in Australia. They want to use some of my (dated) open courseware, and obviously, I gave them permission. What was amusing was how they approached the situation: “We are prepared to not make a profit but will realistically have to cover printing and admin.

Yes, they’re a training company. And this was from their Business Development Manager. How many out there think the courseware should be brought up to scratch, for modern versions of OOo and Linux?

Under a modern version of the CC license, though I’m not sure how many people are out there happily not-attributing and ripping me off, as we speak. Maybe just PDFs, and no sources? Definitely interested to hear anyone’s thoughts on this (via email, even).

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2 Comments

  1. Jonathon says:

    The courseware was good for its time, but as you say is very outdated now. Is it worth updating? If you are still planning to be in that line of work maybe, but I doubt MySQL has much interest in it ;)

    Also, with the OpenOffice.org documentation project, much of the materials that were missing are now available in free downloads or can be purchased cheaply in book format to help sponsor the project. Does it include slides for training – not currently, but others are working on that and will see them become available. There are a number of sites that offer free OOo training slides for non-profit use and many of them are in the same state – still based on 1.x versions rather than the updated software with new features, interface etc.

    All up, a good resource for its time, but probably not really needing to be updated as it is. Maybe donate them to the documentation project as a starting point for training slides to be publicly available and have the acknowledgment guaranteed then.

  2. Jonathon says:

    The courseware was good for its time, but as you say is very outdated now. Is it worth updating? If you are still planning to be in that line of work maybe, but I doubt MySQL has much interest in it ;)

    Also, with the OpenOffice.org documentation project, much of the materials that were missing are now available in free downloads or can be purchased cheaply in book format to help sponsor the project. Does it include slides for training – not currently, but others are working on that and will see them become available. There are a number of sites that offer free OOo training slides for non-profit use and many of them are in the same state – still based on 1.x versions rather than the updated software with new features, interface etc.

    All up, a good resource for its time, but probably not really needing to be updated as it is. Maybe donate them to the documentation project as a starting point for training slides to be publicly available and have the acknowledgment guaranteed then.


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