0

By Paul Biba

Picture 1.pngThe Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University just published a study of the copyright practices of 12 private foundation. The Executive Summary can be found here. The study, which itself is licensed under Creative Commons, looked into the usage of open licensing by the foundations. The study found that:

… the potential benefits of open licenses for foundations and their work are substantial. On a fundamental level, open licensing is in synch with a charitable foundation’s basic mission to create and disseminate learning, knowledge and resources for the public good and can lead to a larger and stronger impact in core areas that are of most importance to the foundation. One participant in the survey explained that the values and goals of foundation philanthropy, including wide distribution of work, broad participation and transparency, “mesh nicely and naturally” with those of many open source initiatives and communities.

Participants in our survey who used, or encouraged or required their grantees to use, Creative Commons and similar open licenses uniformly praised the broad benefits of such licenses in appropriate cases. As one respondent described, “open licenses and open source are the gifts that keep on giving,” ensuring the broadest and fastest dissemination of the valuable ideas, practices, works, software and other materials the foundation’s funding helps to create; permitting those materials to be easily used to create even more and newer works by adapting, reworking and building upon them; and facilitating the sharing and spread of those later innovations. Another explained that open licenses help “spread the learning” and minimize other foundations having to duplicate efforts or investments, and other grantees having to “reinvent the wheel” for work that has already been done. In many cases, a foundation is able to “do more good with the same money” if open licenses are used.

Thanks to ResourceShelf for the link.

 
0