Open or closed?

What counts as an 'open' project? Leaving aside the confusion between open source, open standard and open platform, there's often an assumption that everything on a project has to be either open or closed. Often the best solution might be a mix of what's available. MIT's OpenCourseWare sounds like an open project: free and open access to the syllabi, reading lists, course notes, lecture videos, and other materials from virtually all of MIT’s courses. They built it on top of a customized version of Microsoft Content Management Server; they also use FileMaker Pro (my favourite database for anything I can't do in Excel). From the initial 500 courses they're up to 1,100 courses and on target for virtually all of them by 2007.