Make, DARPA, Altman

Mitch Altman's public parting of ways with the Make folks over their acceptance of a DARPA grant has gotten lots of press (well, it was on slashdot anyway). I'm less concerned about the source of the money the Make fellas have received (which seems to be Altman's concern) than what they plan on doing with it. Here's the list from their response (my emphasis added):

1. Work with engineering and science educators to develop teacher’s guides for MAKE projects that will help educators integrate making into their own curriculum. All materials that we develop under the program will be made available for free under a Creative Commons license. [which flavor exactly?]
2. Develop modular specifications for low-cost makerspaces in educational settings. We want to encourage schools to establish makerspaces, so we are providing some basic guidelines on the costs of getting started. You can find a draft of these specifications on makerspace.com.
3. Write an overall guide to teaching the practices of making for educators, mentors, and others who help coach students to become makers. This is similar to the guide we’ve written for the Young Makers program. (see youngmakers.org)
4. Build a collaborative online platform that can be used by teachers and students to select projects, monitor progress, and generate student documentation for the work. This platform will allow students to work beyond their own classroom with other students and mentors
5. Integrate new design tools for CAD and CAM that help students become familiar with 3D design and personal fabrication. [open source tools? there seems to be a significant gap in free software capabilities here]
6. Prototype a low-cost, open-source CNC machine that can be affordable for schools to use.
7. Over three years, build a network of up to 1000 participating high schools.
8. Showcase the work of students at Maker Faires and bring students together to meet each other and other makers in the community.

Sounds like a very ambitious program, and I really wish these guys lots of luck with it. Since the taxpayer is footing the bill for this, the main thing I care about (as you may have noticed from the post about Stanford's online course offerings) is getting the work funded by this effort available to the public under free (as in Freedom) licenses. In that regard, this is nice to see: All the software we develop as part of the program will be made open source. All material developed for the program will be made available online under Creative Commons.