This collaboration began as an entry in the editor's blog questioning the future of information and entitled "Open the Floodgates". As we became aware of more efforts, we decided to open this up to everyone to add their own link to free information.

The way we deal with information and intellectual property is certainly changing with our use of the Web. If you have not heard of these, let me tell about some projects that evidence a radical change in how we manage and sell information.

• MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW), which, I have been told, considers all the online course material open, much like open source software.
• Gilbane Reports are, apparently, as of January 2005, free. All the articles from the Gilbane Report are now available free of charge.
• Sun Microsystems is making all their software free. While some would say this is to improve hardware sales, this just might be the future of software.

These are not isolated nor peripheral events. These are indicators of a sea change with respect to our definition of intellectual property. Of course we can depend on Microsoft to hold on to the status quo with their legal action against Google (with their suit about the now-Google executive's knowledge of trade secrets). Is it just me, or are we seeing, along with Wikipedia.org something equivalent to the Project Gutenberg on a massive scale? What have you heard?

See the collection of links at opencontent.org. This include the series of books on software development. Bruce Perens Open Source Series (with Bruce Perens, Series Editor) is a series of books that focus on Linux and Open Source technologies for professional software developers and system and network administrators. Each book in the series is published under the Open Publication License (opencontent.org), an Open Source compatible book license. Electronic versions will be made available at no cost.

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