development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

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

Ben Crowell wrote:

> If the license won't fly legally without this onerous restriction, maybe
> that's a sign that the license is a bad idea. I get a lot of nice e-mails
> from home-schooling parents who are using my physics texts with their
> kids. (And -- heh heh -- maybe their parents didn't notice the 
> anti-creationist
> diatribe tucked into that section of the optics text on the evolution of the
> eye :-)
Being a homeschooler myself, which maybe I haven't disclosed yet, is 
another reason I am deeply interested in this issue. We're still 
exploring whether or not homeschools (which generally have to provide 
*formal* notice to their local school boards that they will be educating 
at home) will qualify as institutions. I am hopeful that formal 
notification and recognition of homeschools under law will mean that 
they will qualify.

> Who are the bad, evil non-educational users from whom authors need their
> free information protected? If they exist, couldn't they be fended off using
> a CC license with the no-commercial-use clause turned on?
I'm not sure.  Who are the people in the open source community that want 
to license their materials for free for educational use? I'm not sure 
any analysis would yield a common set of characteristics. The fact 
remains that there are many users of these licenses in the software 
world (although they are a minority of the total OSS world), and by 
analogy there may be many in the content world. If it turns out three 
years from now that no one is using it, then we won't keep working on it.

D