Britannica's reputation has been suffering of late. (Well, this is about 5 years ago.) Not because it was bad, but because it was difficult to use. The original CD version of the Britannica wasn't particularly useful. I, personally, compared it to Comptons rather than to the print edition that I grew up with. And at their prices (and my frequency of use) I haven't re-subscribed. Now it sounds like during the period that I have ignored them they have revamped the indexing and price structure. Again.

Do we need an open source edition? Yes. Given the DMCA, I'm not willing to trust any important work to solely being available in proprietary form. The CRC math handbook isn't available anymore because of copyright issues. (Well, this may have changed again. This was a few years ago.) And people were being told that they couldn't use the table of sines in building interpolation routines. I'm sure that a decent lawyer, a few years, and a bunch of cash could have gotten around that, but the people being challenged didn't have those resources.

Yes, an open source version is needed. Commercial entities can't be trusted with exclusive control of anything. (Actually, I don't think that anyone can, but we are arguing about Open Source here.) History shows that they will press the exclusive control of one resource into associated areas, in a kind of embrace and devour strategy. (No, Microsoft didn't create that strategy. They merely articulated it.)

Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.