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Monday, June 30, 2003   


OpenContent is officially closed. And that's just fine.

My main goal in beginning OpenContent back in the Spring of 1998 was to evangelize a way of thinking about sharing materials, especially those that are useful for supporting education. Here is a brief end of project report.

In the Spring of 1998 I coined the term "open content" and began evangelizing the idea. As of today, Google knows about over 125,000 uses of the term "open content" or opencontent. Google and DMOZ both have categories for "Open Content." Harvard Law uses the term. We've been mentioned by the New York Times, The Economist, MIT Technology Review, Wired, Reuters, and others popular news media. Creative Commons at Stanford Law has cited OpenContent has a major inspiration. MIT has opened its content with its OpenCourseWare initiative, CMU has its Open Learning Initiative, and other schools are following. Several printed books have been published under the OPL. &c.;

All told, I think we're off to a dandy start.

I'm closing OpenContent because I think Creative Commons is doing a better job of providing licensing options which will stand up in court. As I close OpenContent, I join Creative Commons as Director of Educational Licenses. Now I can focus in on facilitating the kind of sharing most interesting to me - that which supports learning - with the pro bono support of really good IP lawyers. And I couldn't be happier.

The OpenContent License and Open Publication License will remain online for archival purposes in their current locations. However, no future development will occur on the licenses themselves. I wouldn't be surprised to see some of their better parts showing up in the Creative Commons licensing infrastructure soon, though.

It's been a great run. Hope to see you over at http://creativecommons.org/ or my personal site, http://wiley.ed.usu.edu/.

OpenContent is dead. Long live OpenContent.


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