Microsoft have made an official press release along with Creative Commons that they will make a free tool available for Office 2003 that allows people to easily publish their work under the Creative Commons licences.
If you haven’t heard of it, Creative Commons (CC) offer freely available licences so that people can publish their content - blogs, pictures, whatever - and allow other people to use their work. There are a number of licences available, which allow you to choose whether to allow your work to other people for commercial purposes or not and so on. All licences mean that you get credit for the original work. It’s a bit like open source, but for content rather than source code.
It’s a growing trend to publish blogs under CC licences, and Flickr supports having CC licences for uploaded work as well. It’s really good to see that Microsoft seem to be embracing CC, and understand its growing popularity. CC is great because it gives you a pool of freely available resources that you can adapt upon or use to make your own content.
“We’re delighted to work with Creative Commons to bring fresh and collaborative thinking on copyright licensing to authors and artists of all kinds…” Craig Mundie of Microsoft
Interesting. I think it’s a good step, because if it means more people choose to open their content to other people, then everyone can benefit. Apart from a few notable exceptions like Blogger and Flickr, for example, not many companies have actually included automatic licensing for CC content in their products. Microsoft have, this time, beaten a lot of people to it.
Download the Creative Commons plugin here.
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Is this part of the new Ray Ozzie strategy? Is this his first move to abolish the grinch-like impression that has dogged Microsoft and which Scoble has only managed to fight off to an extent? If it is, and we see more similar steps, then Microsoft’s future looks secure.
Considering how much stick people tend to give Microsoft for being ‘evil’, it’s surprising how much they do, and it looks like they are genuinely trying to do more.
In fact, for some time now, Microsoft have actually had an open source project, the Windows Installer XML Toolset.
Microsoft get a lot of stick about the past, and they still do bad things. But I think as a company they are desperately trying to shake off their image and reinvent themself.
They also do Shared Source as well, which is where they let people who do a lot of work with Windows have some source code, for a price (the purpose being they can use it to make their products better).