To me, the most interesting part is how clearly the textbook industry and the reporter don't "get" the open source development process. For instance: But [

To me, the most interesting part is how clearly the textbook industry and the reporter don't "get" the open source development process. For instance: But [David Anderson, executive director of higher education at the Association of American Publishers] said traditional textbooks can cost up to a few million dollars to produce, and he is skeptical that such an effort can be re-created on a large scale for a product distributed for free. Of course, there are multiple open-source software projects that would take hundreds of millions of dollars worth of development effort to do again. To me, the number he's quoting seems like so little effort that it's almost absurd to think you couldn't do it. But if you're not in the software development industry, I guess these things aren't obvious. And the related issue is the use of "open source" to describe a process that does not seem to allow contributions from the public, which is of course how those software projects became so big in the first place: Roberts estimated that he spent 80 hours pulling together open-source materials for his textbook, working late into the night to write some sections himself when he could not find good material. I'm not entirely sure, but I think the paper (and the professor) think that "open source" development means putting together class materials that are freely available online. The trouble is that the economic advantage of open source software development is essentially that it is cheaper for someone else, not the original author of the project, to fix a few bugs in an existing open source project rather than starting from scratch. That is why people fix those bugs, and why open source projects grow. If you're not allowing (or really, actively soliciting) those contributions, you can't take advantage of this effect. In summary: using open source textbook materials is a great idea, but it would be better if they learned from how the software industry does it.