development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[Matt Rowland <matt AT paperlove.org>]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2004 at 10:02:16PM -0800, email AT greglondon.com wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 17:00:19 -0400, Stephen Downes wrote:
> All I can do is withdraw endorsement of Creative Commons
> until they honor their mission statement or change it 
> to reflect their current list of licenses. I've changed
> the license on my perl training manual to GNU-FDL. 

A jumping-off-point to de-lurk?

We've been wrestling license issues in OSEF a bit. One of our projects
is to create a media repository with an emphasis on educational
content, and we hope that it will be able to be integrated with
the Wikipedia project. One of the points brought up in our
discussion was that the Debian project had issues with the GNU-FDL,
which is what Wikipedia requires.

That said, considering the high ideals of Debian's definitions, we're
going with a CC license for now. Another of our projects is based on
Debian, so we want to stick to those guidelines. Meanwhile, I'm
watching this discussion.

I'm still hopeful. Was hoping for broader discussion. Never intended
to set foot in the handful of people deciding where a cc-education
license might go. But oh well, too late now. :)

We really dislike any kind of formal institution clause in an
educational license. Learning certainly, perhaps even primarily, takes
place outside of institutional walls. The free software/open source
model is a perfect example of how this holds true -- lots of geeks out
there reading code and documentation to learn and contribute to the
commons. With a recent mission shift, we intend to add focus to
homeschooling situations, a perfect fit for free software as well as
another match for learning outside of any formal institution (though
they are still bound by certain state mandates, I guess).

So I hope things will go that way, that a cc-education license will be
compatible with others. But at the end of the day, you're still free
to choose your license, so we'll go with the best choice for our
goals.

Speaking personally, it would feel like a betrayal of the open source
ideal underpinning this to even allow the option of cathedral over
bazaar, to borrow some choice words.


Matt 

I have no sig, but is it just me or is 'set[ting] foot in [a] handful'
kinda funny?

-Random footnotes:
OSEF - http://www.osef.org
Debian reference -
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200304/msg00246.html
(googled... something might supersede that now)
Debian Jr - http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-jr/
Tux4Kids - http://ww2.tux4kids.com/tux4kids/ (another OSEF project)