Public Institutions Should Use Free Licenses

On Sat, Nov 8, 2014 at 2:14 PM, wrote:
> I had the chance yesterday to talk with folks at SAWBO. Basically as I
> understand it, their project is governed by university conditions for
> funding, which require the proprietary conditions Ben indicated in his
> email.

Ok, that’s clear. I hope UIUC will change it’s policies in the future.

http://creativecommons.org/science is a good pointer. This page is mostly about original research. For educational content the use of free licenses is even more obvious to me. Even if someone else would make money of this content: a. I doubt it could be much. b. it would actually disseminate the information further. c. As long as the share alike clause is used for original content any improvements will be fed back to the commons.

It’s also interesting that most works created by US government employees are in the public domain. I hope more governments and also public institutions will follow that example – though possibly using CC-BY-SA instead of releasing everything into the public domain.