Saw this little gem on BoingBoing today
After Wikipedia, free, collaborative, open kindergarten-uni textbooks:

The second thing that will be free is a complete curriculum (in all languages) from Kindergarten through the University level. There are several projects underway to make this a reality, including our own Wikibooks project, but of course this is a much bigger job than the encyclopedia, and it will take much longer.

All I can say is Bravo, Sir. A goal that will take years and years, but one that is truly noble.

The inertia on a project like that is going to be immense. Dude's going to get flack from everyone, be they teachers (who wants to teach unproven material?), publishers (for obvious reasons), parents (who would want their kid to learn solely from the internet?) and politicians (the children of tomorrow's society will need a better education than some stuff thrown together by anyone at all). All the same complaints Wikipedia currently gets will resurface, as well as some new ones.

However, as the ball gets rolling, (and it will, make no mistake) it's going to get harder and harder and harder to stop. As Wales says, "In the long run, it will be very difficult for proprietary textbook publishers to compete with freely licensed alternatives. An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with."

Information wants to be free, in as much as information can "want" anything. Let it. The only victims will be the business models of incumbent companies, (and I'm sure I've made it clear here that I have little sympathy for those that refuse to change with the times) and the benefactorsbeneficiaries will outnumber them to the order of tens (if not hundreds) of millions to one.  ¶ 10:49 p.m.