Licensing Working Group

The Free University Project believes in the type of freedom that was first articulated by the Free Software Movement and best encapsulated in the GPL and BSD software licenses. It is insufficient to guarantee our students that the university will forever have no tuition or other charges associated. It is necessary to also ensure that the course materials developed for their education have some form of free licensing which encourages their modification and dissemination. Tangentially, but unrelated to this working group, it is also imperative that we ensure the free expression of ideas, since censorship has no place in the university.

This working group has the crucial role of formulating the appropriate license for our course material. I'm a big critic of general license proliferation in free-software / open-source software, primarily since it creates confusion and uncertai nty over the exact guidelines of a given license. In the software world, I'd be pretty much content with just the GPL-like and BSD- like licenses. However, while early free documentation would just affix a GPL-license to the work, I'm not sure if that's the wisest approach when our project will only be producing written texts (without accompanying code that really belongs under a GPL-license).

There are the GNU's Free Documentation License (FDL) and the Open Publication's Open Document License (ODL), but I think the area deserves further consideration before finalizing on some idea. Case in point: the GPL license (and obviously the BSD license) sup port commercial and non-commercial user of licensed code, and I support this as a central tenet of the DFSG. However, would we want a for-profit education dotcom to carte-blanche copy whatever educational resources we might develop and charge for them. Sure, the GPL would require that they release any modifications to the educational materials under the same license, but isn't it more likely that they'll concentrate on key courses internally developed and kept under proprietary licenses and only supplement their offering s with free materials, without contributing anything back? Or maybe they'll be like notHarvard.com and set up free educational courses strictly as an incentive to push sales of coursebooks? Maybe you guys (meaning those who join the working group) will decide that this is ok, and then so be it, but surely it's something that should at least be considered.

This is an important working group with a difficult mission, trying to balance the innate desire to have as free as possible use of university materials with some realistic desire that commercial entities not abuse the resource. The Free Software Foundation balanced such conflicting requirements by requiring that any redistribution of GPL'd software must also include all modifications under the same license. It's unclear, to me at least, whether or not a license exactly duplicating the GPL would further the same underlying motivation in our situation; it may be that a GPL-like license for our content would be more similar in spirit to a BSD-like license for software (as the "source" of content is always distributed, unlike that of software, where it can be compiled first).

I was recently thinking more about the relation of the GPL to software, and our ability to use a very GPL-like license while still ensuring that commercial entities that reuse our developed material, "Do the Right Thing." The answer may, in fact, lie in our acknowledgement or definition of the analogous "linking" in text documents / compilations that exists in software development. The GPL ensures the continuing freedom of its software by mandating that all code that is linked to the GPL code must also have a GPL-compatible license. So, what if we say that the analogous linking in text compilation is broader, maybe something like: all written materials included in the same written material offering must remain under licenses compatible to the free one we finally select. Obviously, though, the devil is in the details, here, and I could imagine that this would be much harder to nail down (and have upheld in court) than the relatively well-defined software-linking process. Anyway, though, it could be a fruitful path to follow to enable us to offer a license every bit as free as the GPL, which, after all, is our current desire (of course, that too may change, as more people join this working group and voice their opinions).

I want to be careful not to go into this with a pre-determined mindset, so that whatever your vantage point it can receive full consideration and deliberation in the working group. Just please join this Licensing Working Group and contribute to developing a suitable license.

Current members:

Daniel Freedman

Licensing Working Group

Current members:

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