development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

Chris Lott said:
>> Well, the "why" does help detemine if the license is a good fit
>> for what someone wants to do. and what they want to do is behind
>> the "why?" question.
>
> Not really. I don't want my work used for commercial gain. Period. The
> reasons why are immaterial as long as a "Non Commercial" license truly
> means what it says it means.
>
> MOST faculty I know express similar feelings. They don't mind their
> material being shared, they just don't want it being sold.
>
> For some, the non-commercial restriction might be about CONTROLLING
> commercial use, but for others it just might be about NOT HAVING
> commercial use. I created the material for other people to use freely,
> not for someone to make money on by restricting it.

Commercial use can not restrict a CC-SA work.
Copyleft and ShareAlike do not allow the license to be changed.

RedHat can sell linux and provide support to the masses,
but they cannot restrict the work. I think most contributers
to linux look at RedHat as a benefit to their efforts rather
than a liability.

This sounds like similar attitudes around software back in the 80's.
Some people came out with software licenses taht were noncommercial
use only. some came out with licenses that were educational only.

GNU-GPL realized that the problem wasn't about money or educational
use, it was about someone downstream making a new version slightly
better than the old version and competing against the old version.
Copyleft solves the problem completely. Software can be shared
under GNU-GPL and no one can make a different version that is
restricted. RedHat can sell linux on CD, but so can anyone else.

If some publisher puts your work in a book and sells it,
any other publisher could take that same content and sell it too.
No publisher can restrict sharealike or copyleft works.

It is sharing in its purest form. It's how wikipedia works
and wikitravel. To me, that fits the definition of "education".

If you're afraid money will restrict the work, your fears
are unfounded. That is the entire point of sharealike
and other copyleft licenses. Restricting the license to
non-commercial or education-only because of this kind of
fear is unneccesary. It was a hard lesson learned by
open source in the 80's, and you don't need to relearn
it the hard way today.


On the other hand, if you're not afraid of some commercial
entitiy coming in and restricting your work in some way,
if you or some other teacher wants to restrict commercial
use of the work so that they can get money from the publisher,
then that's your choice as well. But a NonCommercial license
doesn't strike me as qualifying for the label "Education",
since education means teacher/student, and teacher/student
usually means tuition, and tuition violates the noncommercial
restriction.

The only "eduation" that can happen non-commercially
is people reading stuff on a website and possibly
volunteer instructors.