Selling learning for free

‘Copyright, copyleft and everything in between’ is an animated, interactive flash-based curriculum for high school students in South Africa. It was developed with a grant from the Shuttleworth Foundation (TSF) and was released yesterday for free download (using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike South Africa 2.0 licence) on learningcommons.co.za. TSF has funded 200 free copies of the teacher support materials and the CDRoms for schools in the Western Cape (as the pilot) but we hope to sustain development of the materials by selling “published” copies via the website. And since the materials are already being inserted into learning packs and software in countries as far as Nigeria (the licence allows for commercial re-use of materials), we’re getting a lot more publicity out of the ‘free content’ than we could every have hoped for if people could only buy it under ‘no rights reserved’ conditions.