Friday, September 01, 2006

Non-commercial Clause

I recently heard through David Wiley that several people are concerend about the non-commercial use clause in the license used for Open Course Ware. Specifically, that they weren't sure if their activities were breaking the license. I know this may cause some open content advocates to cringe but I could care less if you make money off of my freely accessible class materials (first I'd have a bit of skepticism about how you could go about doing that)--especially since my class has yet to be posted. But as long as you aren't able to restrict the use of those materials by any other person (including repurposing) then I'm fine with it.

I admit that I'm fairly ignorant of what exactly is meant by non-commercial use, and I understand one of the keynotes at the 2006 Open Education conference is going to address exactly that.