Creative Commons Chooses Fedora 7 for LiveContent Distribution

Published: August 7, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the neat features about the new Fedora 7 development distribution of Linux from Red Hat is that the repository and package manager in Fedora has been tweaked to essentially allow anyone to spin their own release of Red Hat's Linux. And that is precisely what the Creative Commons, a non-profit that offers open licensing of various kinds of content, has done to provide artists, educators, and scientists with tools to open up and distribute their own content.

The Creative Commons was founded in 2001, and its mantra is "share, reuse, and remix." Rather than try to fight the battle of protecting copyrights for various kinds of media, the Creative Commons is trying to create a means of allowing people who create content to permit its use by third parties and in ways that they authorize. Rock artist Beck, for instance, used a creative commons license to make a recent album, recording some rough tracks first, releasing them to fans who then remixed them, and then taking elements of these remixes to create the final album. Pearl Jam has also put out a video under the creative commons license.

"The purpose of the Creative Commons is to liberate content and spread the idea of intellectual property reform," says Jack Aboutboul, the community engineer for Fedora who gets his paycheck from Red Hat.

And so, Creative Commons wants to create a LiveCD of tools to help people collaborate and distribute content, and is using Fedora 7 to accomplish this. Fedora 7 includes a new tool called Revisor, which is a wizard to build a Fedora 7 instance running on a LiveCD, a USB memory stick, or a set of ISO files on CDs for desktops, servers, or appliances. The Fedora 7 repository has somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 programs in it, and those spinning their own Linux distro can pick and choose between those packages. Fedora 7 also includes tools to keep this software patched as the open source projects behind those packages provide security and other kinds of updates.

The Creative Commons LiveContent distribution includes OpenOffice (office automation), The Gimp and Inkscape (for graphics), and various multimedia views and content creators. The CD distribution also includes tools from the Creative Commons to explain how its licenses work as well as where open content resides legally on the Internet.

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