Yesterday Yahoo! release of a library of design patterns (think “best practices” for web interaction designers, though “design patterns” have a long history in software engineering) under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.

See the Rate An Object pattern for example. The “object” used in the example is a restaurant, but could be anything, say a remix (if you’re logged into ccMixter you’ll see a ratings UI very similar to the suggested Yahoo! pattern).

Yahoo! also released a UI library of code that can be used to implement such patterns under the liberal BSD software license.

Thanks to Bjorn Wijers of CC Netherlands for the pointer. CC software engineer Nathan Yergler has more good thoughts on Yahoo! getting it right.