[TOS] Red Hat's education strategy DRAFT: would you want to take this offer?

[Mel Chua]

In the spirit of release early, release often...

== Short version ==

Professors!, can you do me a favor if you have 10 minutes and check out 
http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Red_Hat_education_strategy#Pitch_to_professors 
and 
http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Red_Hat_education_strategy#Fine_print?

This is what I'm thinking about advertising to professors at SIGCSE, and 
I'm wondering if it sounds like an attractive/reasonable offer to 
faculty. Basically: would you bite? Should we do it? (POSSE alumni would 
be eligible for this too!) I'm looking for feedback on what we're 
offering and/or how we're pitching it.

(Yes, I know this is an incomplete description - if folks want, I would 
be happy to explain design rationale, etc. and why we came up with this, 
but I'm really interested in initial reactions to that text alone, and 
what questions it raises.)

The rest of the wiki page is incredibly messy and incoherent, so just 
look at and give feedback on those two sections unless you really want 
to spend a lot of time on something that will shift rapidly over the 
next week.

Thanks!

--Mel

== Longer context ==

I've been working on Red Hat's education strategy for the next year a 
bit over the past 2 months, and with all my time over the past 2 days; 
we're going to be converging on this by the end of the month - though 
it's an evolving document, it'll be in polished "release" format for Red 
Hat executive +1 at the start of March, and then we'll see where it goes.

It's not done. It's not even alpha. It's rough, incoherent, has missing 
parts - but this is the raw, uncensored source, there's no "secret 
behind the scenes" version and then an "edited" one for the public, I'm 
doing all my work right here:

http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Red_Hat_education_strategy

So, a few important things to note here:

* Did I mention this was raw and incoherent? I'm still working on it and 
will post here again later (late next week) when it's been whipped into 
understandable shape. Right now there are logical gaps, math errors, the 
structure of the document is terrible, etc... but if you want to see a 
work in progress, here it is.

* We're exploring options, not making commitments. What we are trying to 
do is practice the open source way by letting people see (and contribute 
to) our work in progress while we are trying out ideas - just because 
something's on here does NOT mean we're necessarily going to do it! 
(When it is, we'll say so.)

Questions, comments, flames, etc - fire away. I'm mostly letting folks 
know I'm working on this and that I'm working on it here. It's *not* yet 
good, it's *not* yet coherent, it's pretty tough to figure out how to 
get involved *right now* - it's pre-alpha, what do you expect? :)

Major thanks to Max Spevack and Sebastian Dziallas for helping 
considerably with the hacking to date; if anything on that page makes 
sense right now, it's probably their fault.

--Mel