Kat Walsh 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).
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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.
Thank you very much for taking the time to put together this thoughtful and candid reply. I really appreciate it, particularly given your unique expertise and experience in this area.
MZMcBride