@figosdev said in Is CC By enough?:
@offray.luna dual licensing is one way to address this. i didnt recommend it because if you dual license cc by and afl, it (usually) has the weaknesses of both-- this is most relevant to your concerns about copyleft.
Dual licensing here will be a mean to an end: showing that CC-By is not enough for people that really care about making the work practically modifiable by others. The first iteration will have dual licenses, so the work can be showcased in places that only advocate for CC-By, but probably we will have further versions only with a license that really reflects our concerns about making the source code available.
i also technically suggested two licenses, but not for the same work-- i wouldnt call this “dual licensing” because its really single licensing for two different purposes and two different works.
I agree, is not dual licensing in that case.
license proliferation mostly comes from misunderstandings about existing licenses, or an organisation wishing to push something in a different direction-- not always through a need. occasionally of course, there is a true need for a new license. i would stress scepticism towards any such need, but they do sometimes arise.
We have encounter that need in real cases already. This remembers me the phrase coined by anthropologist Susan Leigh Star on how infrastructure is relational and only in invisible when it fails. For copyright lawyers licenses is their theme, while software is infrastructure, for hackers is the other way around. For learners and educators licenses are infrastructure and learning is their matter. That shows the relational aspect of infrastructure. And the fact that nobody cares about how or where WiFi is, except when it fails, shows the second aspect.
In our practical needs CC-By has failed us in reflecting our concern for source code of modifiable works (being them software or anything else). For example, in the case of the Data Journalism Handbook, we had to reverse engineer HTML content to put them into a real modifiable source code (Pandoc’s Markdown) to make the content multi format/device (adding PDF and EPUB). Usually works like those start in the Global North and are “disseminated” later to the Global South in the form of translations. More importantly, the invisible infrastructure make adaptation and conversation go into one way (from Global North to Global South). The CC-By license tells that you can extend the work, but HTML doesn’t help into that really as an example of the Poor Technical Choices mentioned in the Open Content Definition, that makes the work less open are shown in case like those (And lets not talk about centralized infrastructures like GitHub, hosted in the Global North, a more complicated that needed for most of the distributed teams. We have taken another approach using simpler "pocket infrastructures, but that would be for other forum post).
imo, people are prone to trying to make “licensing” do things that could be done by other means. with your concerns about copyleft however, the only real solution (within the existing oer paradigm, that is) is probably to use copyleft for source code, and cc by when appropriate to your needs.
In my experience, people do licensing because they want to express their concern about something (or lack of): modification, credit, profit, or infrastructure. As said, the discussion about infrastructures where lost in the early days of “transplanting” FLOSS dynamics to other cultural works, as has been criticized openly (see links in this thread about it). Infrastructure normalize relations and because it was taken out of the most popular licenses (CC family), the normalized relationship was that source code only matters for software, and for everything else the liberties are theoretical, because, in practice nobody has to release the source code, so interested parties need to reverse engineer it (as we have done). We plan to show other way, where legal and technical infrastructures care about source code to make modification a practical liberty, not only a theoretical one, as we already did with the Data Journalism Handbook (DJH), but, this time not only in Spanish.
to me, this is not about whether cc by is “enough” for oer, but whether your source code really falls under the “oer” umbrella. what youre looking for (ive looked at your site) is free software licensing. but thats no reason to not participate in oer when the shoe fits.
its not that i think oer licensing suits every community. the lines between free software, open source, and free culture (somewhere in there, oer) are more pronounced than ever. i do think cc by suits the oer community-- and i am interested in detailed arguments (from anybody with the time or interest in making them) why cc by would not suit oer-- this opinion isnt set in stone.
For me there is no a OER community (singular) but OER communities and that’s where I think that CC-By doesn’t suit them well (too much diversity for a single license). And hopefully here we are making detailed arguments with particular case studies about such ill suitability.
but i think your hackerspace is probably leaning more towards other aspects of free software/free culture, and while im glad that oer is trying to stand against license proliferation, i have to note that free software and free culture use variety of licenses, one of which is likely to address your needs (or even adopt the afl.) Licenses - Definition of Free Cultural Works
please note that i think the hackerspace is a good idea, i applaud and encourage your use of free licenses, and im (always) interested in the place where these different efforts meet together. if you are concerned about copyleft, perhaps leaning towards afl is the right decision for your group. if the group produces more free software than textbooks, why the stress on compliance with de-facto oer standards?
unless im wrong, and your group is focused on producing non-software educational materials, but thats not what i would expect of a hackerspace (i wouldnt preclude such a hackerspace, ive simply never heard of one like that.)
Our hackerspace started in 2010 and was founded from members of the FLOSS and activists communities that is active since early 2000’s (the time when I started also to explore and build OER). So we have a long spectrum of concerns, since almost two decades, with different licenses for that: some are suited to software, some to hardware, some to OER, some to data. In all of them, we care about source code, in the most general sense (the representation of a machine readable form used to create, edit and extend such works).
Some of us see hackerspaces as learning spaces in a pretty practical sense, but also from a theoretical point of view (following Wenger’s definition of communities of practice and even more close work from Schrock about hackerspaces as learning in disguise). Also is a place for developing critical digital citizenship literacy from the margins (not a University, Research Center, or traditional educational setting). So we produce constantly OER, just because we exist, but we don’t do it in the classical way. Most of them took the form of wikis and/or source code repositories, but now we are refocusing on books (like the DJH) and the upcoming booklets, because even in a post-print world which is multidevice and policentric , books occupy a central place and are a bridge with other formats and places.
please note these are opinions intended to be (sincerely) helpful, and i appreciate if instead it comes off as being exclusive or dismissive-- thats not the intention. the intention is more like if someone said to me “this coat is too warm for this time of year” and i said to them “can you tell me why youre not wearing a jacket instead?”
i try to learn from everyone, and i assure you this is not one-way advice. i will probably be giving your post some thought all week long. hackerspaces are the best, i wish you the best of luck with yours.
I believe in your good intentions and desires. Thanks for them.