Can You Believe This?

Okay, I'll be the first to admit that I haven't paid that much attention to the whole open source debate. And while I say I support open source, my own use and puchasing actions indicate otherwise. But when I read this, I was dumbfounded.

microsoft forces changes to higher ed report
http://kairosnews.org/microsoft-forces-changes-to-higher-ed-report
bleckb September 1, 2006 - 14:22.

Inside Higher Education reports that the Microsoft representative to the Commission on the Future of Higher Education lobbied for changes to the final report regarding the language on open source. Here is the original language:

The commission encourages the creation of incentives to promote the development of open-source and open-content projects at universities and colleges across the United States, enabling the open sharing of educational materials from a variety of institutions, disciplines, and educational perspectives. Such a portal could stimulate innovation, and serve as the leading resource for teaching and learning. New initiatives such as OpenCourseWare, the Open Learning Initiative, the Sakai Project, and the Google Book project hold out the potential of providing universal access both to general knowledge and to higher education.

and the revised language:

The commission encourages the creation of incentives to promote the development of information-technology-based collaborative tools and capabilities at universities and colleges across the United States, enabling access, interaction, and sharing of educational materials from a variety of institutions, disciplines, and educational perspectives. Both commercial development and new collaborative paradigms such as open source, open content, and open learning will be important in building the next generation learning environments for the knowledge economy.

I don't think the change is as much conern is that a MS representative, or any representative, business or otherwise, to the council can get a change made after the whole committee has voted for acceptance of the document. Here's the whole story: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/25/gao

Okay, maybe I'm just a naive kind of guy, but this just floors me. I'd like to say "Only in America", but I fear that this could have happened jus as easily in Canada or any other western nation.

tags: open content, open source, politics, open content, open source, politics, graduate student, graduate students, graduate school, higher education, education