Gates is not only a big Feynman fan, he's also a big fan of video lectures. Here's a quote:
"The thing I asked for Christmas last year, those Teach12.com DVDs, the sad fact is that in their science area I now have all of their lectures. These things are brilliant. If you weren’t here to hear me enthused about that, these are not-- they’re kind of pricy, but these are brilliant science lectures. If you want to learn about-- if you want to understand how semiconductors work, get the lecture called 'Physics in your Everyday Life' and watch it. He will explain to you, better than I’ve ever seen explained, because I’ve always tried to explain to people how semiconductors work. If you want to know about geology, just get the geology course. If you want to know biology, you want to know string theory, you want to know anything, they’ve gone and found the very best lecturers in the world and they’re fantastic.
The problem is I’ve seen them all now. I’m going to go back and re-watch maybe about half of them, because they’re that fun and interesting.
Some of them-- my daughter is 11, my son is 8 -- some of them, like I got all their high school ones. Some of those are good enough I’ll get to watch with my kids and go through and see if they’re ready for them. So, I might have to think of something new. I’ve told them they should go get more lectures. There are some areas that they don’t cover very well. They don’t cover chemistry as well as they should. There’s actually nothing that’s really good on chemistry out there."
It's sad that the BBC had sufficient rights that they could sell the tapes outright but didn't feel any compulsion to simply make the films available themselves. How many other such gems are rotting in thier archives?
It's also strange that Gates had to buy the tapes at all. I would have assumed that the BBC had an ongoing digitization program to make material languishing in their archives freely available, and that anyone who wanted to speed a particular video through the process could simply donate the costs plus a little extra. That would have been a lot simpler for Bill Gates than buying the rights and handling everything himself, so I guess there is no such program.
Or, on the other hand, maybe there was no practical reason for buying the rights. Maybe Bill Gates bought the rights as an IP art collector, like someone who buys a Picasso just for the pride of owning it.
Now, Microsoft has been spending money to open-source books for a while; they funded a lot of the Internet Archive's book-scanning program. This is the first I've heard of Gates doing it. I wonder if he really will?
So far it has only been shown that he spent the money. Personally, there is not a doubt on my mind that he will open source the books and I really don't understand why kragen doubt's it, but logically, he is right that Gates might still decide not to 'open source' (a strange term for books?) them.
Philosophically he doesn't seem to be down with the free-culture ideals. So it wouldn't surprise me if he made them "available" to the public — but only, say, that segment of the public that was running Windows 7, with technical and contractual prohibitions on copying or excerpting.
"Take the world from another point of view"
1.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsgBtOVzHKI
2.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnzB_IHGyjg
3.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNOghidK2TY
4.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvqwm6RbxcQ