an education technology researcher who last week joined HarvardX, Harvard's edX group, said in an email that he had done so in part because of edX's open-source direction.

"Borrowing from SJ Klein, we have to decide as a society whether learning resources are commodities to be bought and sold or the public infrastructure of our culture," said Reich. "The open sourcing of edX, supported by some of the world's leading universities, is a great step towards building a public infrastructure for learning online."

EdX had said it would release its source code in the fourth quarter of 2013 or the first quarter of 2014. Instead, it released the code on Saturday and announced the release Wednesday.

Rob RubinEdX VP of Engineering

Rubin said the release moved up because Stanford, The University ofObituaries

Etta Moten Barnett, 102; 'Porgy and Bess' Star Sang at the White House

Etta Moten Barnett, who starred in the 1942 production of "Porgy and Bess" on Broadway and broke color barriers in two 1930s films, has died. She was 102.

Barnett died Friday of pancreatic cancer at Mercy Hospital in Chicago, her family announced.

"Before Halle Berry and Dorothy Dandridge and even Lena Horne, there was Etta Moten, a black actress defying all the odds as an African American woman and performer," Joy Bennett Kinnon wrote in Ebony Magazine.

Horne, who had met the singer several times, called her a "role model."

"My father was in love with her," Horne said in an interview last year, "and my grandfather took me to see her in 'Porgy and Bess.' I met her later