Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Just in case you haven't yet watched it: Big Buck Bunny.

Great animated video created mainly using Blender, released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

The soundtrack/score is now also available under a CC license (as is lots of other "raw" material for the movie).

Ryzom is a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) developed by the French company Nevrax. It is based on the NeL game engine (also from Nevrax), which is GPL'd already.

As "due to market conditions and other unforseen cirucumstances, a request to begin bankruptcy proceedings has been filed at the commerce tribunal", the Free Ryzom Campaign has formed with the aim to buy the source code and game data and release it under the GPL:

Help us make Ryzom a Free MMORPG! Donate now to help us purchase the source code, artwork and other game data associated with Ryzom, so we can breathe new life into it as an open, democratically run player project.

They've even set up a Social Contract (modeled after the Debian Social Contract) which states among other things that "Ryzom and all materials produced by the Free Ryzom Project will become and remain 100% Free Software".

If you want to support the project, you can make a donation pledge (used to convince the official presiding over the liquidation process). No real donations are possible at the moment.

More info/material on the game:

• A presentation, which explains the game, factions, items, ecosystem etc.
• The Ryzom Wikipedia article
• A whole bunch of Ryzom trailer videos at YouTube [1]
• The project FAQ
• Current plan and status
• A Digg article about Ryzom

I'm looking forward to the day where I can apt-get install ryzom and play a fully free MMORG...

[1] I recommend using the Mozilla/Firefox/Iceweasel VideoDownloader extension to download the videos and watch them with mplayer.

(via Karl-Tux-Stadt)

As you might know I publish some of my photos in my photoblog and on flickr under a Creative Commons license.

A very cool example of the so-called remix culture "happened to me" recently — one of the photos I posted on flickr was used as album art for a music CD, namely J. D. Warrick's "Going, a. The Leaving".

Btw., if you want to learn more about remix culture, Creative Commons etc. I can really recommend Larry Lessig's Wizards of OS 4 Keynote titled "The Read-Write Society" (OGG video: 144 MB, MP4 video: 224 MB).

It's strange that the FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory project has managed to remain hidden from my eye until today...

The Free Software Directory is a project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). We catalog useful free software that runs under free operating systems — particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants.

The main difference to similar software directories (Freshmeat, SourceForge, ...) is that "licenses are verified for each and every program listed in this directory", which is a good thing.

If you've got too much time on your hands, here's an idea how to get rid of it and at the same time help the Free Software community...

OSI's License Proliferation Committee has published a first draft report which categorizes Free Software (or Open Source, if you want) licenses.

The categories are

• Licenses that are popular and widely used or with strong communities: GPL, LGPL, BSD, MPL, MIT license, Apache license, Common Development and Distribution License, Common Public License, and Eclipse Public License. I'd really urge anyone who has to decide on a license to choose one of these (preferrably one of the first three, IMHO)!
• Special purpose licenses
• Licenses that are redundant with more popular licenses. Don't use one of these, choose one from the first category!
• Non-reusable licenses
• Other/Miscellaneous licenses
• Superseded licenses
• Licenses that have been voluntarily retired

The charter of the committee states "[t]he purpose of the Committee is to identify and lessen or remove issues caused by license proliferation", which is a good thing, IMHO. I'm fed up with the recent trend that every company or organization invents their own "open source" license (often I would not even consider such licenses remotely open of free, but that's another issue).

In total, the report categorizes 59 licenses into the above categories. I'm sure most people would agree that such a huge amount of licenses is totally useless and only creates confusion and problems. Please, if you have to decide on a Free Software license one of these days, choose a major, well-known one. Or even better, if you currently use a non-standard license in one of your projects, please consider switching to a more streamline license which fits your needs. Thanks!

(via Heise)