A license tells the recipient what he is allowed to do with it. The Creative Commons license is a way to allow spread of work with some limitations, that can be defined by the author. If you write, paint or records something, you automatically own it and others are not permitted to copy, download or re-distribute it. If you put a painting, book, album or other you have created under a certain license, you can actively allow people to re-use or distribute your work. For example to print it in a magazine, submit it to their blog, burn it on a CD and sell it or even remix or manipulate your works.

If you now ask, why you should allow people to do that, there is a simple answer: It could be of good use. Let’s pretend you’ve made a great banner against animal abuse and it’s made public domain, nobody else could use it. Putting it under a creative commons license, people can create banners for their local events for it, or just print it to spread the word.

There also is a financial side in this. The Nine Inch Nails submit music as creative commons licensed and they are still having financial success, because you can gain a lot of audience, giving out things for free and offering something extra they can buy. NIN released the albums under following license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

This allows:

• to share the work with others
• to remix it and produce own work with it

However, you may not:

• claim the full copyright, the songs are still by NIN or the parts you use
• make profit with it and not with derivates from it
• use it without credits to NIN

If you have something, that you would like to share, maybe an essay, maybe a photography you think is important, you can have a look at the creative commons website and find the license, that is right for you.

A quick overview can be found here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

Here a localised page in many languages: http://creativecommons.org/choose/

Another message, that should send an alarming note to all icq-users out there with an incredibly loud "AH AH" and make them see, that they use a service that is owned by a single company. AOL (this formerly big, shitty ISP) sold ICQ to some expanding russian (nothing against russians) company. Well, yeah, I’ll stop daydreaming that people will value independent communication systems like jabber/XMPP.

Links/Sources:

• including some prices: http://www.thinq.co.uk/news/2010/4/28/icq-sold-to-russian-company/
• german article on heise: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/ICQ-nach-Russland-verkauft-989367.html
• german jabber tutorial: http://einfachjabber.de/

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 should be released today. What I saw in the beta was pretty good. One of the major changes: The window control buttons were moved to the left side of the window borders (pretty Mac-like). There also was announced that a menu on top of the screen (again we know that from MacOS) is a possible feature for 10.10 so we can expect some pretty interesting user-interface changes.

Nothing on the ftps yet, so stay tuned with ubuntu.com.

There are, once again, many interesting projects for the summer of code. Trends for this year are JavaScript, Ajax, browsers (Chromium, Mozilla has an entry too), some CMS systems and some cool Linux or platform independent projects like GIMP, Inkscape and blender.

If you want to participate, from my quick peek over the list the main languages that are requested are C, C++, JavaScript and PHP, but also python, ruby, bash, assembler, perl, qt and many other developers are welcome in many projects. I even spotted some Lua and erlang requests. Overall there is more than only writing code to it, smart heads for artificial intelligence and more are welcome too.

Basically it’s no wonder that Chromium is on the list, Google’s Chrome is based on the same code and every upstream is for their benefit. Mozilla is one of Google’s big partners and paid to have Google as the standard search engine in their popular browser Firefox. Some would even say, that the Mozilla foundation is practically depending on Google financially.  Another project that fits the category is Google caja, which works as a framework for secure internet applications.

Another project I literally stumbled upon is Haiku. Haiku aims to be a BeOS like operating system in looks and unity of user interface and software. The goal is to keep simplicity as far as possible. Seven students are in for this years summer of code on this alternative operating system.

If you ask yourself what else Google is and does, I’d recommend you visit the blog of a dear friend of mine, which offers a little more suspicious view on worlds most used search engine: blog.thinking-aloud.eu.