OpenContent Closes Its Doors

meta4 writes "After five years of pioneering the application of open source principles to stuff other than software, OpenContent is closing down. Project Lead David Wiley provides a rationale for the closing on the website, as well as a brief overview of the projects' successes. Wiley has joined Creative Commons as Project Lead for Educational Licensing."

Comments

Re:Is there a copy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, on the Wayback Machine. ;) The licenses will also stay where they are for archival purposes.

I switched to CC also

[MarkWatson]

I understand Wiley's actions.

I used to publish my free web books as Open Content, but I switched over to a CC license also (BTW, I was CC's 'featured commoner' last week - a real honor, because CC is a great group.)

By nature, people want to share, and the CC licenses and agenda helps a lot.

-Mark

Re:Just as he says.

[Surak]

Really? Have you seen the board of director's list for Creative Commons? It reads like a who's-who list of Open Source-supporting IP lawyers, including Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle, and Eric Saltzman. And Creative Commons licenses aren't just BSD-licenses. They have licenses with features VERY much like GPL. They also have BSD-like licenses. It's your choice. You decide.

Re:Just as he says.

[Jetifi]

I think Creative Commons is a better approach, and I think it's even a better approach than GPL/LGPL. The licenses are worded in a very common sense fashion, written by a team of IP experts, and give *you* the flexibility in determining what features you do and do not want in a license.

What you've got to remember is that software developers already have a plethora of licenses to choose from, based on what freedoms and flexibilities they want to keep/grant/whatever. A good summary of the "licensing ecosystem" is this table, although I'm sure there are better onces out there.

The "open content" licensing scene never had the choice between a good number of licenses all worked on by professional IP lawyers. CC provides the creative equivalent of the BSD, Apache, LGPL and GPL licenses, and maybe one or two more.

Re:As long as...

[autechre]

Funny, yes, but please do consider that freshmeat provides features other than a search engine. We edit the descriptions to ensure that they're sensible and (relatively) easy to read, and a human processes each new application or a change to an existing application. We also do have Category Reviews to highlight applications we list for a specific purpose/niche, and other original articles. And projects can announce new releases on the front page in order to get attention (and let existing users know a new release is out, of course [though if you subscribe to a project, you'll get an email]).

You may want to check out http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/495/ for more information on what we provide for users and developers.