MIT Open Source

The goal of this project is to provide a central location for storing, maintaining and tracking Open Source software that is developed within the MIT community.

MIT Open Source

MIT Open Source

  1. Open Source at MIT
    The goal of this project is to provide a central location for storing, maintaining and tracking Open Source software that is developed within the MIT community. This Source Forge project is intended to hold larger software development efforts as well as the bits of code that often slip through the cracks--items such as templates, visual basic macros and utilities that students find useful and yet often have no central home, thus forcing students to "reinvent the wheel. The first way is to simply release templates or macros to the release area. You must register with us to do this and then all you have to do is follow the directions to upload the file on Source Forge and create a release.
         
  2. MIT's open-source story brings bloggers in
    Wouldn't you know it? I finally caught up with Wade Roush's open-source cover story in the paper issue of MIT's Tech Review. I had posted an item on it months ago. I find the resulting article to be a useful round-up of many tech trends. Lacks a strong point of view, though. Maybe it's because I know that hundreds of people participated in the editorial process, but it reads a bit as though all the sharp edges have been sanded down. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I'll bet this process thoroughly vetted it for errors. Still, I'd like to have Wade's feedback on this. (He's in Africa for a few weeks, and presumably not scouring Technorati for feeds.) In any case, I'm going to be studying this case, because I'd like to launch an experiment in the same vein on this blog.
        
  3. Report on MIT open source learning
    David Diamond reports in Wired on initial feedback on MIT's open source online curriculum: "One of the most popular offerings turned out to be Laboratory in Software Engineering, aka 6.170, a tough requirement for electrical engineering and computer science majors. Lam Vi Quoc, a fourth-year student at Vietnam's Natural Sciences University, relied on 6.170 lectures to supplement a software lab he was taking, and Evan Hoff, a software developer in Nashville, followed the course to improve his coding skills. In Karachi, Pakistan, a group of 100 students and professionals met weekly to study 6.170. In Kansas City, five members of the Greater Kansas City Java Professionals Association gathered monthly to take the course. In Mauritius, a tiny island nation in the Indian Ocean, Priya Durshini Thaunoo used 6.170 to prepare for a master's degree program at the University of Mauritius. Saman Zarandioon, an Iranian refugee living in Vienna, studied it to continue an education that was stalled by the Iranian government.

  4. MIT's open communications campaigner
    It's a brave man who questions whether there's a future for media company chief executives when sat around a table with three of the biggest in the business. Andrew Lippman, a senior research scientist at MIT's Media Lab, speculated about the demise of the media honcho at a roundtable last week at the Media Summit in New York. Michael Wolf, the president and chief operating officer of MTV Networks, Kevin Roberts, the worldwide chief executive of Saatchi and Saatchi and William Cella, the chairman and chief executive of media services company MAGNA Global Worldwide were left uncharacteristically lost for words. The essence of Lippman's argument is that we are rapidly approaching a time when consumers can create and publish content as easily as large media outlets; under such circumstances why would we need chief executives of media companies or media companies at all?  ZDNet UK caught up with Lippman on Wednesday to discover his thoughts on open media, open source, copyright, and what exactly he's working on at MIT. 
         
  5. Open-source journalism at MIT Tech Review
    Talk about one-upmanship. The editors at MIT's Technology Review saw our little open-source experiment on the podcast story, and called to say that they've been cooking up something similar, but far more ambitious. Here's an e-mail that followed from Wade Roush: As I said, I?m a senior editor with MIT?s Technology Review; I work out of the San Francisco bureau. The blog I mentioned is at http://www.continuousblog.net. Jason Pontin (the editor in chief) and I conceived is as a preview and companion to the feature story I?m preparing for our August issue. The feature is about blogs, podcasting, RSS, camera phones, next-generation web services like Technorati and Delicious and Flickr.
      
  6. MIT's Open Source Education
    The open source aspects of MIT's recent decision to post all of its course materials online, free of charge. 'MIT faculty chair Professor Steven Lerman said the Open Courseware plan will address the academic community's growing concern over what he called the "privatization of knowledge...We also need to take advantage of the tremendous power of the Internet to build on the tradition at MIT, and in American higher education, of open dissemination of educational materials and innovations in teaching," Lerman said. "Everybody knows that the way to make progress in science is by using the best results of others," MIT electrical engineering professor Paul Penfield.
          
  7. MIT Innovation: Open Source Education
    Those who use MIT's new Open Courseware program will not receive credits toward a degree, but they can access materials for roughly 2,000 courses free of charge. While many schools and universities struggle with the question of how best to integrate the Internet into their curricula, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced Wednesday that it will publish materials for almost all of its courses on the Internet. The initiative will take about a decade to complete and will include lecture notes, syllabi, exams, simulations and streaming video lectures for nearly all of the research university's 2,000 courses. Unlike its counterparts in the commercial online arena, MIT is not concerned with implementing subscriptions fees or filters for users accessing its original content.
          
  8. MIT urges Brazil to adopt open-source
    MIT's Media Lab has recommended Brazil install open-source software instead of proprietary software offered by Microsoft on thousands of computers that will be sold to the poor, according to a letter obtained by Reuters Thursday. We advocate using high quality free software as opposed to scaled-down versions of more costly proprietary software," Walter Bender, director of the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a letter to the Brazilian government. "Free software is far better on the dimensions of cost, power, and quality. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and several ministers may decide as early as this week whether free software or a simplified version of Microsoft's Windows will be installed on computers for a new effort called PC Conectado, or the Connected PC.
          
  9. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a private research university located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Its mission and culture are guided by an emphasis on teaching and research grounded in practical applications of science and technology. MIT is organized into five schools and one college, containing thirty-four academic departments and fifty-three interdisciplinary laboratories, centers and programs. Founded in 1861 by William Barton Rogers, MIT has contributed to defense research during World War II and the early decades of the Cold War as a federally funded research and development center. The Institute has played a key role in developing the electronic digital computer, the inertial navigation systems used in missiles and spacecraft, and biomedical engineering.
         
  10. MIT joins the Open Source philosophy
    In an article titled "MIT to make nearly all course materials available free on the World Wide Web" the The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the new project for the publication of all their material in the next ten years. In their own words "the project expects to provide materials for over 2,000 courses across MIT's entire curriculum�in architecture and planning, engineering, humanities, arts, social sciences, management, and science. This is a big step towards the transformation of our culture to a more collaborative environment. Just as evolt (and many more) has done they are using the power of the Internet in a giving way, allowing all their knowlerdge to be shared. I believe that the Internet will help us change from out current mood of competition towards one of more collaboration, this is a great time.
             
  11. The open source curriculum: MIT's open courseware
    Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia dreams of a free curriculum - open, high quality course materials built by a grassroots movement of volunteers . But Wales is not alone in his dreaming. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology also wants to spread the wealth - but not through a groundswell. Open Courseware is all about the heights. OCW publishes syllabi, course calendars, readings, exams and other study materials from over 1,100 MIT classes - "a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world." Sounds good. And it is pretty good, but it's important to know one crucial fact: at this stage, many, if not most, course readings are only listed for reference. Anything in the public domain is available for download (or is linked to a free resource like Project Gutenberg), but most of the courseware is not, in effect, open.