4 ms·
I am hugely in favor of this move. It's a tiny first step to decreasing the cost of education and further opening educational access to truly everyone. But, i
by waterlesscloud 14y ago
I am hugely in favor of this move. It's a tiny first step to decreasing the cost of education and further opening educational access to truly everyone.
But, if I may indulge in a cynical moment, I note that one of the touted benefits of CC-BY in the article is that commercial companies can develop tutorials from these tax-payer funded books.
What if the tutorials then become the required texts? Are there any safeguards from this? If not, it's inevitable that it will be done.
- eric-hu 14y agoAs I see it, commercial companies already develop learning tools--high school and college textbooks. These coursebooks are already required reading in classes. There already exist companies that profit off of universal education. That's not to say that there should be, but I think the situation will get better. With higher quality free educational texts, the for-profit companies will have to produce much better material or lower their prices to keep sales up. Either way, it seems like the learners benefit.
- rmc 14y agoIt would be better if they choose CC-BY-SA, which requires that derived works be under that licence aswell. (Neither CC-BY nor CC-BY-SA block commerical use, and that's fine IMO)
- duskwuff 14y agoIndeed, one example of commercial use that's possible (and desirable!) under these licenses is printing the books and selling them. Blocking that would make it harder to get the books into students' hands.
- simonbrown 14y agoIf it was share-alike, why would companies develop tutorials, since they could be re-published by other companies at close to cost price?
- rmc 14y agoThere are loads of companies the make money off open source software. Same principal.
- wmf 14y agoYeah, this is the BSD vs. GPL issue. If you want to ship BSD/Apache-licensed stuff you better have good marketing so that someone doesn't use your own software to crush you (BSDI-style, if anyone remembers that).