ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
*****************************************************************************

Lisa,
        I have no problem with folks taking a good idea
and using it to help visitors to their museum learn
the same concept.  But Open Source and Public Domain
is only fine if everyone is capable of providing their own
support and doesn¹t need a lot of hand-holding.
        I can¹t tell you the number of times people have
seen something I have developed and want recreate it,
but they don¹t want to do their own engineering, they
want me to provide them blue prints for free and then
want to be able to call me for free help when it doesn¹t
work the way that it was expected to.  I know the
Exploratorium faces the same thing.  People often fail
put a value on your time, they only see their out of
pocket costs.
        My advice to the community is to either be willing
to pay someone else for their time to reproduce a
good exhibit for you (as the Exploratorium does) or
figure you are going to have to provide your own time
to design, test and figure out all the little bits that
take something from an idea to a reliable-user friendly,
exhibit.

Dave Taylor
-------------------------------

From: "(Lisa Jo Rudy)" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Informal Science Education Network
Subject: Re: patents, copyrights, and hands-on learning

Wendy suggests an interesting analogy!  I absolutely agree that there's a
close parallel between the creative educational community and the open
source
code folks.

Just attended a lecture today by ex-Netscape programmers, who described the
culture of open-source coding and mentioned a foundation based out of MIT (I
think it's called the Open Source Code Foundation, actually) that is the
evangelist of the concept.  Apparently there are those who advocate open
source code
no matter WHAT -- and are ABSOLUTELY opposed to any form of patenting,
withholding, or otherwise circumventing freedom of access to code.  Don't
know if
there's an analogy for this group among the museum community!

I look forward to reading the articles Wendy referenced!

Lisa

Lisa Jo Rudy, Writer/Consultant
625 Chelten Hills Drive
Elkins Park, PA 19027


***********************************************************************
More information about the Informal Science Education Network and the
Association of Science-Technology Centers may be found at http://www.astc.org.
To remove your e-mail address from the ISEN-ASTC-L list, send the
message  SIGNOFF ISEN-ASTC-L in the BODY of a message to
[log in to unmask]