Creative Commons has always recommended and used free and open source licenses for software. We have long provided a deed and metadata wrapper for the GPL. Occasionally we’ve highlighted free software that complements CC licensed media, free software that we create, and pragmatic and philosophical correspondences between free software and free culture. Alex, Jon, and…

All of the videos on our support page are now available as Ogg Theora files. Theora is a high quality video codec that is not patent encumbered. You can read about free formats on Wikipedia. As to why you should care, read Jimmy Wales’ two year old blog post on Free Knowledge requires Free Software…

Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have united to publish the Sitemap Protocol under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Sitemaps provide a way for webmasters to tell search engines how to crawl and index websites more intelligently. Obviously it is a huge win for search engines and webmasters if all agree to use the same protocol. This…

OWL multimedia has launched an audio similarity search engine stocked with 10,444 CC-licensed tracks from ccMixter and Magnatune, with many more to come from other CC supporting sound repositories. You can search OWL via search.creativecommons.org but its real power is finding new music through music. The OWL website allows you to choose an mp3 on…

ZDNet has a short and very sweet item on Rice University’s Connexions, a very early adopter of the CC Attribution license: How far can this go? One of the big problems in college education is the cost of textbooks and courseware. It keeps smart kids from getting the degrees they need to succeed. Connexxions is…