Creative Commons and Fedora Team Up To Deliver LiveContent Distribution

Cameron Parkins, August 6th, 2007

San Francisco, CA — August 6, 2007

Creative Commons today announced the release of LiveContent, a collaborative initiative to showcase free, open source software and dynamic, Creative Commons-licensed multimedia content. Red Hat’s Fedora 7 will serve as the platform for Creative Commons LiveContent CD. The first LiveContent CD is now available at the Creative Commons and Fedora booths at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

The Fedora Project is a Red Hat-sponsored, community-based open source collaboration that provides the best of next-generation open source technologies. Its latest distribution, Fedora 7, features a new build capacity that allows for the creation of custom distributions and individual appliances.

“Fedora 7 features a completely open source build process that greatly simplifies the creation of appliances,” said Jack Aboutboul, community engineer for Fedora at Red Hat. “We encourage Fedora 7 users to create custom distributions that fit their individual needs and are excited that Creative Commons is making use of this capability within Fedora 7 to enable the liberation of content and provide free licensed software to all. This is the first step in bringing Red Hat’s open source community and Creative Commons’ “share, reuse, remix” initiative together. Our communities have always been talking about a common vision of free software and free content – today we have both decided that it’s time to start bridging those gaps.”

The Fedora 7 operating system boots directly from the LiveContent CD, making use of the open source tools found in the latest Fedora distribution like Revisor, Pungi and more. The CD features a variety of Creative Commons-licensed content including audio, video, image, text and educational resources. From the desktop, users can explore free and open content and learn more about businesses like Jamendo, Blip.tv, Flickr and others supporting creative communities through aggregation and search tools.

Also included are a number of open source software applications including OpenOffice, The Gimp, Inkscape, Firefox, multimedia viewers, open document templates and others. The LiveContent CD is a product of collaboration across a number of organizations – Red Hat is providing in-kind engineering support via Fedora 7 and many open source community members collaborated on the included software applications. Worldlabel.com, member of the Open Document Format Alliance, is supplying ongoing support for the development and distribution of the LiveContent CD.

“When we decided to explore LiveContent, we knew we would need a reliable, community-driven platform on which to base our content,” said Jon Phillips, community and business developer at Creative Commons. “We had a previous relationship with some of the engineers at Red Hat and knew the Company’s solutions to be valuable, well-developed and reliable. We envision LiveContent to be a stepping stone to dynamic distribution of open content. Forthcoming versions of LiveContent aim to support autocurated packaging of Creative Commons-licensed content, allowing for the most up-to-date, ‘living’ content distribution. For this to happen, we’re calling on community members and content curators to join the effort to help spread open media.”

For more information on Fedora, to download or to join this community effort, please visit: http://fedoraproject.org. Visit http://creativecommons.org/project/livecontent to learn more about the project and get involved with future versions of LiveContent. To obtain a copy of the LiveContent CD, visit the Fedora and Creative Commons booths at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

About Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works—whether owned or in the public domain. Creative Commons licences provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. It is sustained by the generous support of various organizations including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation as well as members of the public. For general information, visit http://creativecommons.org.

About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for three consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Contact

Jon Phillips
Community + Business Developer
Creative Commons
(415) 369-8486
jon@creativecommons.org

Kerri Catallozzi
Red Hat
(919) 754-4268
kcatallo@redhat.com

Press Kit

http://creativecommons.org/presskit