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I fail to see how dropping NC/ND types from CC v4.0 would be a benefit.
If the authors would really want a license that amounts to one/both of the NC/ND and there's none to reference on the CC site, they'll specify them expressly; so "hiding" them from the CCv4.0 set of licenses won't bring more "liberty" for the community.

Right. Or they'll write their own licenses, which has a couple of big disadvantages: (1) Non-lawyers will write their own licenses and mess up, or people will put things in their license that will have unintended consequences. (2) There will be lots of different and incompatible licenses, which makes sharing more difficult. Neither of these is purely hypothetical. There really was an overproliferation of licenses ca. 2000. E.g., here is a license created in 1999; its author now recommends using CC instead. The existence of both GFDL and CC-BY-SA has created huge hassles for a lot of people. There are definitely examples of misconceived clauses in software licenses, e.g., the infamous BSD advertising clause. A similar example in non-software licenses would be the optional invariant sections clause in the GFDL, which caused major hassles in debian documentation.

Mea kulpa; very sorry please forgive me Mr Khan. I even read the article (to check if I couldn't find a linked torrent to troll the poster with), went back and copied from K Dawson. Oh the irony of having a nick which means I can blame only my own failure. I shall find an appropriate punishment for a troll. Go and read 4chan or dive off a bridge or something ..

P.S. In searching around I have found that

• the Khan Academy is a nonprofit, so if you do like the videos and manage to download them then please do donate (see FAQ and donate link at top of page (paypal only unfortunately).
• the videos have only just been clearly opened up - thanks to David Wiley (and again Salman Khan) for that; it's really important people follow up issues like this as early as possible.
• They are "working on having the content mirrored somewhere other than YouTube" (see FAQ again)
• there are quite a few Khan academy torrents already up on the pirate bay
• quite a few of the torrents listed below seem to go through registration etc so aren't exactly free.

I'd hope that someone starts downloading and manages to put all these up on a traditional download site (ibiblio or something?) and / or torrents.

I've been caught in the trap of referencing one license by shorthand when it really is another license that is being discussed

You mean like the GPL vs. the LGPL?

Or to put it more bluntly, there is no "Creative Commons license".... there is a whole bunch of 'em and they are mostly incompatible with each other.

FSF had the same problem with the Open Publication License: the basic license was free, but it allowed option A (no derivatives) and option B (non-commercial), either of which made a work using it non-free.

At least if you were referencing the GFDL, you knew you were talking about a specific document that was well defined without this sort of ambiguity.

The GFDL has its own non-free option, and it is called Invariant Sections.

I worked in a UK university for 4 years, and I can assure you that there is a mad dash in the last 5 years prior to retirement in which academics will take on as many responsibilities as possible in order to boost their final salary. Anyhow, the man in question has posted a note on his blog this morning clarifying his stance.

Well, I actually sent him an e-mail last night, as did a few thousand other lecturers by the sounds of it. Appears the article has misquoted him somewhat.

I've taken a class from him. You can sign up to follow his open learning seminar via his blog and wiki. Though his lectures are only on blipTV, he does read everyone's blog and will respond.

I'm also a professor and I find blog-based discussion to be far superior to face-to-face. A few topics require the immediacy of being in person, but many many more conversations are best when each party has the time to think between submitting responses.

However, the headline is taken WAY out of context. This is what he said:

"If universities can't find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them (what's happening in the economy, affordability, the impacts of technology and openness, etc.)... universities will be irrelevant by 2020."

Cited from his blog

Creative COMMONS deprecated its two almost never used licenses which did not permit at least global noncommercial verbatim distribution, see http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7520

Incompatible licenses within the CC suite is of course a valid criticism. For those who get the requirements of the OSD/free software, the solution is to stick to using CC-BY and CC-BY-SA, which CC calls out with approved for free cultural works branding.

Disclaimer: I currently work for CC.

...Terence Parr stated that's one reason the ANTLR v3 documentation was published rather than put up for free on the website.

I have an oldish book (Debian GNU/Linux: Guide to Installation and Usage,) here that is published under the GPL, and another (What is Lojban? .i la lojban. mo) published under the Open Publication License.* "Published" and "Online for Free" are mot mutually exclusive.

Every copylefted open educational resource is incompatible with every other copylefted open educational resource with a different license.
The only free-as-in-speech licenses of any importance at this point are GFDL and CC-BY-SA. I'm not a lawyer, but my inderstanding is that GFDL and CC-BY-SA are compatible enough that by dual-licensing a book under those two licenses, I can incorporate photos that are under both licenses.

In answer to the arguments in your blog post about this licensing issue, I don't think the logic of the section "Historical Lessons Of The OPL" makes sense as applied to FWK. FWK is providing the books as free downloads, which means that the prices of the books in print can't be significantly higher than the incremental cost of production. Therefore there's no risk of being undercut.

I currently attend WSU. Dr. Mateti is certainly a great professor (he says after changing majors after taking Mateti's OS course) and did push hard for an "ethical hacking" class. I was going to take it before I changed my major, but I heard from several friends that they learned more in that class than any other class they took at WSU.

For anyone interested in the class (CEG 429), Dr. Mateti licenses all his lecture notes under the Open Publication License.

found in the del.icio.us popular video feed

I can't see any videos there, should be any? It's just a compilation of popular del.icio.us links, just like Oishii but built internally.

--
Superb hosting 4800MB Storage, 120GB bandwidth, $7,95.
Kunowalls!!! Random sexy wallpapers (NSFW!).

But Red Hat can't say "remove all instances of the Red Hat name from the site".

CentOS has every right to say that they rebuilt Open Source Code ... and say (and link to) where it was obtained from. That means that they have to mention both RedHat and the product (rhel). CentOS can't say that their product is a RedHat product, or that it contains a Red Hat product ... but they can say how it was made.

They also have every right to publish any documents that are either released via GPL ( http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html ) or Open Publication license ( http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/ ) whether they contain redhat's name or not.

CentOS must mark each instance of Red Hat as (R) ... and they should have a disclaimer that says CentOS is not producted by, supported by, or affiliated with RedHat, INC. , which CentOS had, and RedHat forced them to remove.

RADM is published in Bruce Perens' Open Source Series at Prentice Hall under the Open Publication License.

Doesn't look like a very open license to me.

First, the GPL is a software license, and is less suitable as a copyleft license for books than the GFDL or a CC license.

A group of volunteers that are the major source of content, if not the sole source of content are dissatisfied with the hosting companies decision to change the look/feel of the site it volunteered to host. (Note, hosting someone else's site does not give you editorial control over it, nor ownership of it!)

These volunteers have build and shaped the site for most of its existance.

The hosting company decides that it owns all the content on the site, and the copyright to all content on the site, no matter what the authors say. Hosting site goes as far as stripping copyright and removing authorship credit to articles as it reformats said articles to the new & improved format. Mirrors have the original articles in original format, some of these get changes in a alleged attempt to erase all references to the original copyright and formats.

The Authors rebel, take their IP find new hosting site, respectfully request transefer of the Domain names to new hosting site, and register a DOTNET version of the domain in addition to the DOTCOM they with transfered.

The Hosting company threatens for return of said IP that does not belong to it, corrects some but not all copyright infringement, and starts a FUD campaign.

Slashdot Non-RTFA-ACs complain about the authors and copyright holders fighting for their rights.

/. trolls bad-mouth the content authors for wanting credit for their work, and laud the Hosting company for trying to own the tradmark that other people have built over time. (Note, this is not an employment issue, where the employer claims IP and copyright to all works created by the corporate serf. This is a site that was published under OPL and similar licensing. Open Publication )

A previous article about how maptech obtains their map data prompted a reader to propose an opensource type map data clearing house with the data being submitted by volunteers. I am working on trying to create just such a thing and I am looking for some kind of protection for the data to keep what happened to CDDB by Gracenote from happening to it.

Now it sounds like if something is a fact, such as the location of something by lat/long, the titles of tracks on an album by some artist, or the square root of 144, it is in the public domain by default, assuming this bill doesn't go through. Am I interpretting this correctly?

Looks like our friend Wiley just couldn't quite let it go after all....

The nav bar at the top of the page contains a link called content.

"Hmm..." I thought, "maybe it's not gone after all?" Turns out that link should have read contact (as the bottom nav bar reads).

the front page of the opencontent.org website should say something like, "we're making things even better by joining Creative Commons. come join us".

it's just that simple. what he wrote instead is depressing and inspires feelings of FUD. Spin is important, and not all spin is bad. Put your best foot forward, and don't air dirty laundry.

the front page of the opencontent.org website should say something like, "we're making things even better by joining Creative Commons. come join us".

it's just that simple. what he wrote instead is depressing and inspires feelings of FUD. Spin is important, and not all spin is bad. Put your best foot forward, and don't air dirty laundry. All projects and movements have dirt: people don't need to hear about it.

I'm an active documentation volunteer so this is very important to me. I have to admit that I have always found the GFDL confusing and arbitary (like its limit of how many words you can add to a front- or back-cover text). As a non-lawyer, I found the Open Publication License to be more straight-forward.

Here is the Open Publication License: http://opencontent.org/openpub/

Its only drawback are the non-free options: option A requires permission for derivative works and option B limits commercial publication. However, this can be overcome by specifying "using the Open Publication License without Options A or B".

I looked around the web site and couldn't find any mention of the relationship between this project and the original OpenContent project that maintains the Open Publication Licence. What's the story?

This week we learned that Windows and Office are the heart of Microsoft's monopoly, financially speaking.

Office, one of MS's two profitable divisions, gives Microsoft a 79% profit margin for each product sold. I have a feeling that if your average Joe only KNEW about openoffice.org as an alternative, they'd use it in a heartbeat. Businesses might be harder to convince, but when I told my dad about OO.o, he just about shat himself. $400 saved.

If the Internet community can raise $100K (in what was it, 5 weeks?!) to free Blender, surely if given enough time we could raise a million for say, a Superbowl or Oscar ad in 2004. I'm sure there's more than one corporate competitor of Microsoft's that wouldn't mind kicking Bill in the financial balls by making a modest contribution to the OO.o publicity effort.

I can see the ad now...

"Coming up next, the Oscar for Best Picture..."

CUT TO BLACK.

FADE UP:

MEDIUM SHOT OF a SILVER CD-ROM on a DESK with "openoffice.org" scrawled in BLACK SHARPIE.

AS WE SLOWLY ZOOM IN TO THE CD-ROM...

ANNOUNCER: Hey, America. Four hundred bucks is too much to pay for Office software, don't you think? But now there's an alternative you can download for free and copy for your friends. It's called OpenOffice.org. The people who make the "monopoly" version of Office don't want you to know about it. But we do. So visit www.Openoffice.org and give it a try. This message was paid for by thousands of Internet users around the world who thought you should know about alternatives to supporting the monopoly.

TEXT: "OpenOffice.org -- A free alternative"

FADE TO BLACK.

I'd put ten bucks in for this ad. Just the articles ABOUT the ad and how it was financed would be great publicity.

(Oh, and I hereby release all the text above under the open content license, v1.0.)

From what I recall, Opencontent.org has been around for a few years.

It's released under the OPL and both an HTML version and a PDF version of the book are freely available.

I've been a member of the IEEE for many years. I've published in IEEE publications. But I don't publish in them any more.

Why? They don't add any value, and they want too many rights. For one thing, they want ownership of the content. That's not customary; the usual arrangement for magazine publication is that the publisher gets the right to first publication in serial form. The author can then reissue the material in other media, such as a book. And real magazines pay authors. A writer friend who heard about the IEEE deal described them as a "vanity press".

IEEE journals don't pay reviewers. Yet what they'r e really doing is trading on the reputations of the reviewers. The review process needs to be separated out from the publication process, which is what the Open Content people are trying to do.

More to the point, I get more hits on my web site than the IEEE sells copies of most of their technical proceedings. The publications aren't in Google.

When a machine generates a translation, there are no issues of copyright ownership, because machines are not authors in the statutory sense; the owner of the machine can claim copyright and move on.

When individual human translators get involved, there's an entirely different order of complication. Sure, it's possible to use licenses like the OPL (Open Publication License) to navigate these complications, but the compliance problems remain an obstacle to overcome. It'll be tough to remain competitive when babelfish and google don't have to put up with similar issues.

When this is added to all the other problems associated with massively distributed activities relying on humans to function, I just can't see how it'll succeed. Too bad, perhaps, but nonetheless true.

I hate to gripe (ok, not really), but where is the mention of Open Content in this article? The project released its first non-software license (the open content license) almost four years ago... Raymond's book the Cathedral and the Bazaar is licensed under the Open Publication License, as have been a variety of other books (example). It's pretty disheartening to get passed over in favor of the GNU project who were *much* later getting involved in the content/non-software world formally, with specific licenses, etc. This is the kind of non-recognition that makes busy people drop their time-intensive, unappreciated projects... Geesh.

Look at the Open Content License and the Open Publication License.

Look at the Open Content License and the Open Publication License.

As pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, the Open Publication License covers the problems mentioned.

Much of the Open Content license appears to be geared toward software documentation, while the open publication license is more flexible. But I do have a question (I probably should have started a new thread). Does anyone know of a use of the Open Publication license outside of Geekhood? I am working on a book proposal for a non-geek book, and am wondering if I can point potential publishers to precedents for use of things like the open publication license.

Much of the Open Content license appears to be geared toward software documentation, while the open publication license is more flexible. But I do have a question (I probably should have started a new thread). Does anyone know of a use of the Open Publication license outside of Geekhood? I am working on a book proposal for a non-geek book, and am wondering if I can point potential publishers to precedents for use of things like the open publication license.

I'm currently planning / writing an open source book (" Object Oriented Software Development with PHP ") myself, so I'm interested in other people's experiences, too. I use DocBook to write the book and CVS to manage the XML files. I chose the Open Publication License (OPL), because I think it fits my needs best. Although I just started last week, the first pages are already online, so that I can recieve feedback from readers even at this early stage of writing. This helps in finding topics I should focus on, because there's more interest in it by my prospect readers. HTH, Sebastian

The Open Content licenses of course, plus the GNU Free Documentation License and the Design Science license. There are undoubtedly others, but these are the ones I'm familiar with.

My own book (The Instructional Use of Learning Objects) is available online for free (under the OPL) as well as in costs-money print form. Not only does this give you the opportunity to have people submit live errata, etc., but the electronic version of the book is the best press the print version could get. We pre-sold around 500 copies before the book was even to the printer by having the material online.

The other great opportunity afforded by having the book online is the community / discussion you can facilitate if you can convince your publisher to put the URL to the free online version on the cover of your printed book (this was not so easy for me).

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid took a similar approach with The Social Life of Information.

The solution presented was

Open Content - which seems to have some use in the academic fields.

Of course, when I check my link, the site is down, which probably means it's been checked and slashdotted already.

However, I do see some limitations with the opencontent project, and seeing a generalized GNU license for written works would be nice.

• For free hosting of free-as-in-speech books, see Andamooka. They also allow you to give annotations and comments.
• For a catalog and reviews, see my site, The Assayer.
• Opencontent.org - licenses, and a directory of open-content works
• Internet Public Library
• Project Gutenberg
• ibiblio - an archive of free information
• On-Line Books Page and Book People mailing list - has an emphasis on old books that have fallen into the public domain
• Samizdat.com hosts a bunch of free books, plus lots of good articles and links
• Association des Bibliophiles Universels - hosts PD texts in French

The GPL is specifically written to apply only to software. You're looking for the Open Publication License (OPL).

It is time for the site to move on, I intend to open it up for many contributors. I intend to get a few excellent orienteers and expeditionists to join me in making this site even better, and I intend to release it under the GNU Free Documentation License (but with some modifications to allow people to print and distribute printouts more easily).

Have you considered using the Open Content License instead of hacking up Yet Another License (YAL)? Might be more along the lines of what you need...

Steve Oualline's book "Vi IMproved--Vim" is pretty good both as an introduction to vi, and to the vim-specific things as well. It's also released under the Open Publication License.

I'm sure you could do the same with your own work. I considered doing the same with the work I did in a group project for a University paper recently.

As a student, I don't see any reason there should be any restrictions on how you deal with the copyright. The creation is yours and you can do what you want with it. I'm pretty sure the policy you've pointed to is intended for faculty and staff.

Even as a grad student, I had to sign a nonexclusive license to the Queen (in Canada, as represented by the National Librarian). The copyright remains in my name and if I want to OPL/GPL it, I can.

Staff and faculty have a more complicated arrangement because their research is technically a "work product" (further complicated by the fact that it's usually funded by the University, a granting agency or two and some private donors). If you ain't getting paid, I wouldn't worry about it.

Greg

I suspect it wouldn't make the pages that Microsoft links to open, although it may make the links themselves open. But links are (or at least shouldn't be) the same as the content that they point to. However, if Microsoft adds slogans and logos for products, I think those could arguably be opened as well.

I do think there are legal questions here-- is microsoft "republishing" your page by changing the layout/display/presentation from the author's intentions? I dunno though if it's really a copyright violation per se.

Microsoft better really be careful about stepping on other people's logos and stuff though, because they could possibly violate trademarks (?).

Dunno. Not a lawyer.
W
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• Open Publication License
• FSF's take on the OPL
• The source for the book is available (in addition to the html version).

That was one of the concerns which lead to the creation of the Open Content License back in 1998:

http://www.opencontent.org/opl.shtml

It's commonly used for books which are released both in print and on a free basis on-line, eg., Linux Administration Made Easy, and all the content at Linux.Com.

Add language to open source licenses specifically prohibiting the use of any software, hardware or legal tactics to hinder redistribution. Specifically state that that particular clause applies not just to people who use the software, but to anyone who stores or transmits it. The value of open source is in the free distribution that allows collaborative communities to form. Any action that hinders that harms every user of open source. Use those licenses vigorously on any code or writing you produce. Make the web a minefield of intellectual property for them.

Copyright (c) 2001 by dsplat.
This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).

So what does it mean to have a society of abundance? In the part of the world where I accidentally happened to be born (the northwest coast of north america) native societies lived within a social framework in which everything necessary for survival was available in practically unlimited amounts. "Commodities" as we may understand them were essentially free - one only had to go get it, whatever it was - salmon, shellfish, cedar bark, etc.

This pre-columbian leisure society evolved an appropriate social form, which provided a framework for the equitable distribution of wealth, as well as an outlet for competition and sparring for social dominance. The core institution was the Potlatch, a gift festival in which one clan would fete and feast another, which was both an invitiation to enter into a close bond, and a challenge to try to surpass the generosity of the potlatch hosts, at a later time. These went on all winter long, and constituted "the solemn assembly of the tribe" (see Mauss, The Gift, 1950), during which what we would term public policies were debated and enacted.

This institution was particularly well developed in the native american societies from California to Alaska, but it is present in one form or another in every world society, and it is always the reciprocal nature of the gift which is central. This is present in the familiar idea that accepting a gift implies an obligation to return it - not in the literal sense of giving it back (that would be refusing to accept it - a grievous insult) or whipping out your wallet and paying for it (which would be an even greater affront.) And even in the cutthroat and "pragmatic" world of business it is ultimately a very careful balance of favors granted and owed that carries the day - "Godfather, do this small thing for me..." etc.

Potlatch.net exists to promote, propagandize, and experiment with the theory and practice of the gift economy of the future, which is as Gillmore very forcefully suggests, the only way off of the runaway train of corporatism.

The gift economy has hitherto relied on face-to-face contacts, personal relationships. It will be necessary to devise a way to build upon this principle in the "billion channel universe" of the internet. My guess is that we need to develop a network of networks composed of groups of people who actually know one another, who can vouch for each other in meaningful ways. Groups of several hundred people would have an "aggregate reputation" that could be trusted to persist in time, even if a reasonable proportion of members turned out to be flakes.

We don't just need a boston tea party - we need a form of economic power that will allow us to operate from a position of strength and independance. The only practical way to do this will be to devise ways of withdrawing value and services from the current centralized financial system, and placing it in trust of future generations by extending the principles of copyleft and the free software movement into every area of society.

The only way to arrest the 'de-evolution' of our society -- in which what you are is reduced to what you have, and what you have is reduced to what you just think you have -- is to launch a counter-offensive of abundance, a potlatch to which the whole world is invited. A good first step is to take a look at the OpenContent licence for digital works, and start using it, extending it, and educating and encouraging others to use and extend it. A good next step would be to start building local groups in which resources and contributions are freely shared, a pot-luck approach to social organization - and to imagine ways for these local groups to "peer" with one another to allow gifts to be offered and accepted across regional boundaries. to be continued - see http://www.potlatch.net

Will these books be 'open source' in other words can I re-write the ending if I don't like it ? That would be cool. So many stories have happy endings these days. It would totally rock if we could rewrite them...

These books aren't like that, but it has been done.

All my own stuff on my webpage (stories, music, not nearly as good as any of these guys' stuff) is currently under the Open Content License because, well, it was the closest license I could find to what I wanted. If you want to rewrite a story cause it's crap, knock yourself out.

Now all we need is open sourced good material.
--

For what it was worth, this wasn't the first time I found something I wrote on another site. This happened with another page of mine on arcade game components. Things went quite a bit different that time.

A web site in England copied the work. My emails to them were completely ignored, and I was getting absolutely nowhere. It was, yet again, a commercial web. They were selling arcade games, parts, and service. It wasn't worth going all-out to try to do something about a site in a foreign country. Normally, this would have been the end of the story.

Luckily, I wasn't alone. I had posted my article under the Open Content License, which is a GNUish license for text documents. I explained my problem to them, and they went to bat for me, and actually got the offending site to give in!

If you personally publish information online, and you don't want to see it ripped and commercially exploited, I can easily recommend this method over going it alone.

And going it alone is tough. I can only imagine that, without the help of the Slashdot discussion forum, and its readers, my complaint would have ignored my complaint and the content would have stayed.

What we need is to collect open content (see Opencontent web site, Andamooka) and create online tools for organizing and redistributing it.

This worked for open source software (who doesn't reuse other people's code?), but open content is a little different b/c the typical content re-user isn't technically proficient like typical code-reuser (programmer) is. Those who are need to create the necessary tools. This is part of the discussion going on in the FreeBooks project.

Dave