The inspiration for this project comes largely from the efforts of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. We are motivated to both promote learning and freedom, and to encourage the members of our community to become good neighbors.

The Open Book Project is aimed at the educational community and seeks to encourage and coordinate collaboration among students and teachers for the development of high quality, freely distributable textbooks and educational materials on a wide range of topics. The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web are making collaboration among educators on a global scale possible for the first time. We want to harness this exciting technology to promote learning and sharing. We will thus produce all of our materials with the following aims and guidelines in mind:

1. All educational materials will be covered by a free license such as Copyleft to insure contributors that their contributions will remain freely available for all users to share and develop.
2. All software used in our textbooks will be covered by the GNU General Public License or some similar free software license.
3. We will promote the development of a community of learners by actively encouraging both teachers and students to take part in the development of educational materials.
4. We will support the equality of languages by helping to make our materials available in as many languages as our resources permit. We will be developing materials in both English and Spanish ourselves, and we will seek out and host translations into other languages.
5. We will make extensive use of web based technologies to make our projects multidimensional and interactive. We will keep explanations as concise as possible and use hands on, learn by doing methods wherever we can.