development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[email AT greglondon.com]

I recently discovered the Creative Commons 
website, and I used the CC-BY-SA license
on a Perl Programming training manual that
I wrote. 

I've been around the software open source
community for some time. I'm not a major
contributor to any project, but I put in
bits and pieces on occasion.

When I first discovered the CC website, I
was surprised that it had Non-Commercial
as one of its options. This is an idea that
has been pretty much dropped by most of the
common open source software licenses.

I then came across this "education license"
discussion list. On the general license discussion
list, I just posted a message about license 
incompatibility. Creative Commons has a good
idea extending the idea of Open Source to works
beyond software programs. However, it has a
LOT of options that is basically prohibiting
a large pool of works that the public can use
and add to.

An "educational license", while a noble idea,
is ignoring a lot of the lessons learned by 
open source software over the years.

Commercial/Noncommercial limitations on a license
only end up causing license incompatibilities.
Noncommercial works can only play with other
noncommercial works. Commercial works can only 
play with other commercial works. GNU-GPL, 
possibly the most famous open source software
license, does not prohibit commercial use, but
it does require that GNU-GPL works only play with
other GNU-GPL works.

A company called RedHat sells installation
disks, software support, books, and other stuff
around the Linux operating system, which is 
totally licensed under the GNU-GPL license.
RedHat has made improvements to Linux and
those changes, because of the license, have
been given back to the public under GNU-GPL.

As strict as GNU-GPL is in some senses, it is
very liberal in how you copy, distribute, and
create derived works with it. As long as derived
works remain GNU-GPL'ed, you can do whatever 
you want with the software. Some companies, like
IBM, use it on their web servers and charge tons
of money for their services, hosting web pages,
email lists, and the like.

any change that IBM makes to the software must be
GNU-GPL'ed, and goes back into the public pool
of modifications that anyone can use and benefit
from.

I'm afraid that the multitude of Creative Commons
licenses is ignoring one of the major problems
encountered in Open Source software, namely
license incompatibility. There is already a 
discussion on the CC general license list about
license incompatibilities >>> AMONG DIFFERENT
CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSES <<<. Adding an education
only license will only splinter the public works
that can play together only further.

CC appears to be ignoring another important lesson 
learned by open source software, namely the power of 
copyleft. Copyleft means that derived works are
licensed the same as the original. and if the original
allows people to freely copy and distribute and if 
derived works are allowed as long as they're copylefted,
then the work cannot be subverted by some evil,
non-educational institution.  This was learned
by open software licenses that originally wanted 
to exclude commercial uses, thinking commercial uses
was a bad thing.

If your intent is to create a pool of public works
of music, video, text, (and educational works of these
different medium) then you will be served well by
the CC-BY-SA. Commercial companies may improve your
work and sell it, but the improvements remain public.
non-educational institutions may improve and change 
your work, but the improvements will remain public.

The only thing CC-BY-SA will NOT give you is a monopoly
on making MONEY on your work. And if that is your priority,
then it supercedes the idea of contributing a work to
the public pool.

If you want to make money on your work, then you should
license your work CC-BY-NC-ND. This will prevent anyone
from modifying or selling your work, but allow people to
distribute it until the hype builds, the word gets out,
and Rand-McNally is pounding down your door begging you
to let them pay you to publish your book.

You want to license it CC-BY-NC-SA??? Well, the problem
with that is you can't accept fixes and improvements from
other people without them becoming part owner in the work.
Once you accept a contribution to your work from someone
else, you have to get their permission to relicense it,
meaning you just might have to give them a cut of the
money that Rand-McNally wants to pay you for your book.
And if you relicense it to Rand-McNally for commercial 
use without the contributers's approval, you're open to
a lawsuit.  SCO is currently suing IBM claiming that the
version of Linux that IBM is selling contains code that
SCO owns the rights to.  Unless you get every contributer
to assign copyright to you, they still own the copyright 
to their contributions that have been rolled into your work.

So, if you want to make money on your work, you might as
well go CC-BY-NC-ND and save yourself the possible headache
of a lawsuit.

If you want a monopoly to make money on your work, 
then that takes priority over contributing a work
to the public pool.

Oh, and I just released a Perl Programming Training 
manual under the CC-BY-SA license. You can get it
at www.greglondon.com, you can sell it if you want,
use it in your classroom if you want, make changes to
improve it if you want, but if you improve it, those
changes are under CC-BY-SA as well, and I can roll them
into my original document, giving you credit for your
contributions. Evil Microsoft could use it for some
Evil, Non-Educational use, but if they make any changes
to the document to improve it, I can roll those changes
into the original work, and the public pool gets a 
better training manual.

CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-NC-ND are the only two licenses
you need. And an educational license ignores two 
big lessons learned by open source software:
license incompatibility splits the large public pool
of works into little puddles that must remain unconnnected
and excluding groups from the public pool ignores the
contributions that they could bring to the pool.

ShareAlike or Copyleft or whatever you want to call it
is all that's needed to guarantee the public pool of
works is always the best and it avoids license incompatibilities.