Yesterday Dr. David Wiley of Open Content published the Open Education License Draft. Before the text of the draft itself he relates some of his thoughts and experiences relating to open licenses from a decade of promoting open content.

Though wary of the proliferation and politics of open licenses, he suggests that there is a need for a new license for educational content that is easy to apply and understand, which maximises user freedom and compatibility with content available under other open licenses, and which minimises user restrictions.

He describes the ‘four Rs’, or ‘the four main types of activity enabled by open content’ – reusing, reworking, remixing and re-distribution – and argues that while they significantly overlap we should strive to ensure that open licenses protect the freedom of users to do them all. He flags up how copyleft clauses can inhibit the extent to which open works can be remixed (see his Noncommercial Isn’t the Problem, ShareAlike Is for more on this). He also discusses the problems with public domain dedication – concluding that it ‘is not an internationally viable mechanism for open content’.

The draft for the Open Education License is certainly compatible with the Open Knowledge Definition and looks like it will be the most liberal open license available. We look forward to seeing how it develops.

Related posts:

1. Removing the nc: why license restrictions on commercial use are problematic and (frequently) unnecessary I was very interested to hear about the Deptford.tv project from Adnan Hadzi when he spoke about it at the Free Culture UK meetup. However given Deptford.tv’s focus on remix and reuse I was surprised to see that they use...
2. Is Citizendium Not Open? Following a link from Peter Suber’s ever-valuable Open Access News I read Larry Sanger’s blog entry We aren’t Wikipedia (Citizendium blog, March 21, 2007) which lists the various ways in which Citizendium differs from Wikipedia. This made interesting reading but...
3. iCommons 2007: Retrospective Reflections The iCommons conference in Dubrovnik, where I’ve been for the last few days, finished yesterday. This has been a great event (a big well done to Heather Ford and all the other organizers) and I’ve had the chance to talk...