development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[Ben Crowell <cceducrowell03 AT lightandmatter.com>]

<quote>
All this success has bred a few problems. For starters: profiteering. I show
Margulies an email from Thailand. "A group of us here are considering
opening a University devoted solely to 'e-learning courses from MIT!'"
writes the sender, who says he hopes to offer "Bachelor of Science degrees
in MIT Studies."

"He can't do that!" she shrieks.

Soon, the budding entrepreneur is sent a stern reply stating the guidelines:
People are free to use, modify, translate, and distribute OpenCourseWare as
long as they don't try to make a buck from it.
</quote>

This seems like a good example of how unnecessary a cc.edu license is.
If this use was undesirable, it could be prevented with a CC license
containing the no-commercial-use clause.

The word "profiteering" is also interesting. The standard free-software
philosophy about this is that profit is good -- go ahead! Many people are
willing to pay Red Hat for a Linux distribution because Red Hat provides
various services. The cool thing is that the user gets to decide whether
those services are worth it or not. Similarly, I know of at least one
person in India who has distributed my books to his students without
paying me a dime. It makes a lot of sense in his case, because I can't
really compete in the Indian textbook market: students in India can't
afford to buy the books from me, and are happy to get a lower-quality
sheaf of photocopies rather than a bound book, because that's what they can
afford. (And BTW, this guy is a private tutor, so he would have been
shut out by the proposed cc.edu license, which requires an affiliation
with an educational institution.)