Is Licensing Really the Most Important Question for OER?

Ruth Suehle | OpenSource.com | October 26, 2011

Ahrash Bissell, project manager for the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education and former executive director of ccLearn (the education division of Creative Commons), posited to the attendees of the Open Education Conference that worrying about OER licenses puts the focus in the wrong place.

"If you follow the writings of people in this space, there are regular debates about why the noncommercial term is evil, or how the global commons must have a sharealike clause," he said. "It's part of the definition of OER to have a licensing element, but that's the only defining feature--it gives people permission to do things." Then when you ask how to produce OER, get it into school systems, and produce sustainable business models, the licensing becomes more of a distraction.

Open education resources are special because of the ability to adapt them and spread them. If the goal is to promote a pool of resources where anyone--publishers, teachers, consortia--can take them, change them, and republish them, then the license must make that "vanishingly simple," as Bissell put it. He asserted that the CC-BY license, and not even the public domain, which is more complicated than it seems on the surface, is the only way to do that...