Creative Commons has since its launch in 2002 acknowledged free
software as an inspiration, but in-depth communication and understanding
across the "free culture" (and education, science, government...) and
free software movements has been thin, resulting in missed opportunities
(at least on the free culture side). Two developments make early 2012 an
opportune and necessary time to address this. First, Creative Commons has
kicked off a process which will eventually lead to the release of version
4.0 of various CC licenses, which ought incorporate the best wisdom about
public licenses (most of which resides in the free software community)
and not need to be versioned again for a decade. Additionally, among the
issues under discussion for CC 4.0 licenses are ones of direct import to
the free software community, including how DRM and license compatibility
are addressed. Second, CC licenses have become fairly widely adopted as
policy for public sector and publicly interested materials and funding,
especially in education. Free software and even open standards are
inadequately accounted for these developments, presenting a significant and
unappreciated threat to the realization of public benefit from such --
a continuation of the tendency of free culture (with the exception of
Wikimedia) being dependent on proprietary web silos. This talk will very
briefly summarize the relevant history, describe the pertinent CC 4.0
licenses and policy issues, and hopefully provoke solutions and actions
benefiting free software and free culture.
