development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

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

Ben,

Thanks for your messages last night. If had been anyone else I would 
have thought it was a denial of service attack on the list. =)

Ben Crowell wrote:

> 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.
We definitely want to hear what you have to say! Onward...

> --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?
There's a partial list of OSI approved licenses at 
http://opensource.org/licenses/ and the list is really large. And though 
you're right in the assertion that most software is licensed under the 
big 3, I believe the world is a better place because of Mozilla's 
openness and other projects that are largely open but for whatever 
reason couldn't use one of the big 3. There is some confusion, yes, but 
if confusion buy me mozilla and other projects that wouldn't happen 
otherwise, then I'm for some confusion.

I hope that no new material is being licensed under the OPLs; 
opencontent.org discourages that now. The GFDL is only (or mainly) used 
for documentation (as it says in the title). So for the vast majority of 
content that has yet to be licensed, it seems that the cc licenses (of 
which there are 11, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/) are the 
only real choices.

> --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?
Free would not, but "free for educational use" would. If you've ever 
been 10 weeks into teaching 8th grade math in an inner city school in 
New York without textbooks because the school system can't afford them, 
you would thank the Maker for free materials, whether they were free to 
anyone other than you or not. (My best friend just lived this experience 
not long ago.)

> --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.
That's good! I hope you never lose that vision. As I've said before,

(1) The best thing for increasing access to educational opportunity 
(AtEO) would be having people dedicate their materials to the public 
domain. However, the vast majority will not, so

(2) The next best thing for AtEO is having people license their works 
with a standard CC license. However, there are still very many people 
who will not, so

(3) The next best thing for AtEO is having people license their works 
with cc.edu

The goal of cc.edu is to reach content on that next tier. It doesn't 
excite me the way public domain materials does, but if this little bit 
of confusion can get us the mozilla's of educational content, I believe 
it's worth it.

D