Kat, Thanks for the comments. You say that CC "has its struggles but this is not something I currently see as a major concern". Would you be able to encourage CC to post more recent 990s and audits so that others can evaluate for ourselves? If CC published a rehabilitation plan, that would be helpful too.
Thanks, Pine On Feb 13, 2015 10:29 PM, "Kat Walsh" <k...@mindspillage.org> wrote: > 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> _______________________________________________ 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>
