I guess I am in as good a place as any to try to answer this question (and I'm speaking only for myself, here).
I think only the barest sliver of the organization needs to exist for the licenses to exist--that is, someone willing to carry on the name and core mission, even if the org can't itself pay anyone's salary to work on it full time. Much of the other work CC does is more resource-intensive, especially if it wants to take on the long-term issue of policy change, but let's say we're only concerned with the immediate scope of your question. For your particular concern to be addressed, someone needs to be willing to undertake needed maintenance of some canonical version of the licenses. The vast majority of the time, this means simply keeping the servers running so that they remain accessible; on rare and what I hope are increasingly infrequent occasions, it means revision of the license suite. (I have joked that I will be happy to consult on the 5.0 revision from my retirement home.) The main resource this takes is time, from people with the necessary knowledge and commitment to do it. This rare process benefits from an organization that can support paying for full-time work on it, but does not strictly require it. So the organization and the licenses are tied together in that someone needs to be the license steward, but not necessarily the organization in its current form. (The real requirement is that the license steward have the trust of the license-using community, so that people will still use the CC licenses as stewarded by whoever does it. It is possible to have competing forks of the licenses and this is a bad idea for the same reason forks of many types of standards with network effects are a bad idea.) CC currently has seen better times--in an attempt to make its financial situation sustainable many staff were recently let go, which is why I am no longer there. But it is not yet down to bare bones, and I think there is a much greater likelihood that support would continue to exist for that bare bones work (and if I'm putting my speculative hat on, paths for such support could include getting taken under the wing of a law school, for example). tl;dr: CC has its struggles but this is not something I currently see as a major concern. -Kat waving hello to the CC staff who lurk on this list... On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 9:34 PM, MZMcBride <z...@mzmcbride.com> wrote: > Hi. > > On the subject of Creative Commons... > > How stable is the Creative Commons organization lately? > > How tied together are Creative Commons the non-profit organization and > Creative Commons the licenses? > > Or perhaps more bluntly: if Creative Commons the organization collapses, > what's the likely short-term and long-term impact to Wikimedia wikis? > > MZMcBride > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
