development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[David Wiley <david AT wiley.ed.usu.edu>]

Downes, Stephen wrote:

> Not to be snarky, but: you know where I stand, and once I know
> how the decision will be made, I will be in a better position
> to provide input. But if there's no process, if it's simply
> 'whatever Dave decides,' and if Dave has already decided against
> my view, then there's little point to contributing.
>
> Process first. Then decisions.
>  
Stephen (and all),

It's true that I am driving this process. Following ESR's lessons of 
open source software:

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's 
personal itch.

I have a "personal itch" to create an educational use license that will 
(1) get some publicity and, therefore, use and (2) will actually stand 
up in court. Some people may not be interested, and others may just flat 
out wish I wouldn't, but I believe I should.

I'm reminded of the experiences involved with the beginning of 
OpenContent. When I first discussed the idea of a new open license just 
for content, some people were excited and others were opposed. RMS was 
vocally opposed (of course) because I'd chosen the open path instead of 
the free one. He had other oppositions as well, and as a relative 
unknown in the OSS community it was tough to try to launch the project 
over one of the community's loudest opposing voices. However, I have 
never been sorry that I carried the project on, despite opposition. And 
I believe that there are many other who are glad that I carried it on.

I'm a firm believer that two heads are better than one, and more than 
two are better than two (assuming they're not part of a formal 
committee). As I've lead the effort to develop a cc.edu with support 
from cc, I've tried to bring lots of heads into the conversation to make 
the license as useful to everyone as possible. I'm particularly excited 
to have the help of very competent IP lawyers on the project.

The process which we are carrying out is this: talk, talk, keep talking, 
ask questions, hopefully get answers, make suggestions, incorporate 
suggestions, talk some more. This process iterates until the suggestions 
and criticisms start to stabilize. Once there is little new coming in, 
then make a recommendation or proposal, get more discussion, and stop 
where you are if the majority of people seem to think the current spot 
is a good one. This will translate into a vote once a stable 
recommendation is put together (I think the current structure is fairly 
close myself, but then again I though the license option approach was a 
good idea. I'm still willing to be swayed by people who will engage in 
dialog, as Wouter and others have.).

I think you'll see suggestions which have been made have been 
incorporated: stand-alone license rather than license option and 
separate branding through a differently colored button. However, at the 
risk of sounding rude, the suggestion of "this is a bad idea - let's not 
do this" isn't going to be incorporated. I don't think you would drop 
your work on fair compensation for RLO creation in distributed learning 
object repositories if I suggested that it would harm the community by 
encouraging people to release pay-for-view content. It's an itch you 
have, you think its useful, and you're probably going to continue trying 
to scratch it. And that's just fine.

Finally, I don't actually know where you stand on the cc.edu, other than 
that you would like the process to stop before it reaches a conclusion 
because you believe it's bad for the community. However, since the new 
draft was posted on this listserv on June 19 you have yet to comment 
(actually, you did comment after its posting but indicated that the only 
draft you knew of was the one posted on the blog in March). I respect 
you as a thinker and would like to hear your opinions on the language 
and intent of the current license draft. However, if the entire 
undertaking is wrongheaded to you, that's fine as well, and there's no 
need for you to continue spending cycles on it.

Anywho, I hope that people will poke holes in this morning's proposal. 
If nothing happens for a week or so, we'll call for a vote on the proposal.

D