development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[Ben Crowell <cceducrowell03 AT lightandmatter.com>]

I'd like to thank Wouter Vanden Hove for inviting me to join this discussion,
and Dave Wiley for all the hard work he's done on applying free information to
education. I'm a little intimidated to be joining the discussion at this late
date -- I've made an effort to catch up on the discussion, but please let me 
know
if my comments betray my ignorance of what's already been said.

I've had some physics textbooks (www.lightandmatter.com) under the GFDL and 
OPL licenses
for a while now, and have just recently changed them all over to a CC 
license. As I look
at this proposal, naturally I start thinking in terms of my own books. I have 
a negative
reaction to the proposal for an educational CC license for several reasons, 
but maybe
my reasons wouldn't apply to other people.

--proliferation of licenses--
One thing that worries me is the proliferation of licenses. We already have 
GFDL, two
versions of OPL, and 8 versions of CC, for a total 11 licenses. Do we really 
need to make
it 12? The proliferation of copyleft licenses has already caused vast 
problems in the
world of software. For instance, Mozilla does not yet have full support for 
MathML and
SVG (support is incomplete and buggy, and is not included in the default 
builds), and one
of the main reasons is incompatibilities between licenses. The world of 
copylfted
software is a couple of orders magnitude bigger than the world of copylefted
books, audio, and the trend seems to be that software is increasingly being 
released under
only a relatively small number of licenses: GPL, LGPL, and BSD. I have a hard 
time
believing that a much larger number of licenses is appropriate for the much 
smaller
world of non-software.

I think we should also keep in mind that only a vanishingly small percentage 
of the
population has ever even heard of the concept of open content, copylefted 
books, etc.
If they happen to hear about the idea, and are interested, why confuse them 
with a
patchwork of incompatible licenses?

--balkanization of free information--
The whole idea of free information is to break down barriers, but by creating 
a new
license restricted to education, we erect new ones. The excitement of free 
information
lies in serendipity -- Linus Torvalds never dreamed that his toy operating 
system would
be used for all the things it's being used for now. Do we want to end up with 
some
free textbooks that can only be used in a school, not in corporate training? 
Some free
music that can only be played in nightclubs, not concert halls? Some free 
photos that
can be incorporated into collages, but not used as props in theater sets? 
Would the
word "free" even be proper to apply to these works?

--why?--
My biggest question is why this is really necessary. What are the examples of 
books,
songs, paintings, and poems whose authors really need to restrict their use to
educational settings? Speaking only for myself, restrictive, non-free licenses
don't excite my imagination the way real free information does.