[daveloyall]

A.O., I am glad that you've become a programmer. Keep it up.

Does anybody else dislike non-free (both in $ and license) educational materials, particularly in the field of programming?

Full disclosure: I don't know anything about Udemy other than that they apparently charge money for educational materials related to programming.

Seems to me that knowledge is passed around from person to person via various mediums, but every given idea had to start somewhere. (Let's put simultaneous independent discovery aside!)

So... Let's say that Bob learned the syntax of python array literals from Jane who learned it from Mike who read the docs which were written by Fran who first learned the syntax by reading a post on a mailing list written by Sam who wrote the code that defines the darned syntax (though arguably he based it his experience with other languages).

Where the does an outfit like Udemy fit in that picture? How does somebody take public knowledge and charge for it? Should there be pushback against this practice? Is the license under which the documentation was released relevant?

[EDIT: Hmm. Ok, I accept these answers. There was a reason I asked. :) ]

[gms7777]

Non-free educational materials aren't charging money for the public knowledge, they're charging money for the effort it took to put the public knowledge in a form that is easy to learn from. This effort is very often non-trivial. The public knowledge is still out there, and the person putting up material behind a paywall isn't subtracting from the availability of that knowledge.

Now, it would certainly be different if the person was literally just copying the documentation, or somebody else's free or non-free materials, because thats just plagiarism. But I think if a person goes to a significant effort to make educational material and wants to charge for it, and there are people to whom this material is valuable to pay for it, then power to them.

[tjr]

Often, the raw knowledge regarding programming is just as freely available as the tools: official documentation for compilers, interpreters, libraries, whatever, or, failing that, the tool itself as a source of knowledge.

Many such resources are available free of charge.

Other people come along and write different materials based on that same foundational knowledge. Maybe they are better writers, and can express the same thing in a more understandable way. Maybe they have a different slant on the whole topic, like the difference between reading The Little Schemer and the Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme.

In any case, these authors certainly may introduce something new: their own writing! If you don't find any value in that over the baseline documentation, then you are not obligated to read it, but I see nothing wrong with authors charging for their own creative work, should they so desire. (There is also nothing wrong with them giving it away for free, should they so desire. It is theirs to distribute how they see fit.)

It is conceivable that the original documentation and/or product could be licensed in such a way that further works describing the same content could be inhibited. I vaguely recall some open source product that was developed and supported by a commercial entity forbidding commercial documentation from including the name of their product in some form (while further non-commercial documentation they found acceptable).

[asillystory]

Why should there be pushback? You have educational materials with varying levels of digestibility. One person may refuse to pay because they can just read the python docs, another may be willing to pay $10 because someone spent effort to present the information in a directed, guided, and easier to digest manner. Another person may spend a few thousand to get guided instruction from a teacher instead. Such is life.

[icebraining]

If all you need is the public knowledge, you can just read the Python grammar, which fits in a page.

The reason Udemy and such are useful is not because they include facts, but because they offer a structured and thought-out guide to understanding and learning them. A lesson is more than a dump of information.

[detaro]

They add value (for people who like video tutorials) and offer an alternative, so why shouldn't they be able to charge for it? They don't just take free content and try to resell it slightly repackaged (at least as far as I know) and they compete fairly with free resources, so I think that's ok.

RE license: As long as they don't copy directly from the documentation or the examples, the license shouldn't really matter. And even then, at least some examples from the docs might be to trivial to protect (you won't succeed claiming to own the code snippet "list = [1,2,3]" or similar). I don't think you can have a successful language aimed at the public and at the same time successfully forbid people from creating third-party documentation for it.