rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

Poster by Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0

This is the next 30-45 days (okay a month) of knocking out all kinds of projects I’ve had in the queue for months, literally. The first of these is the Creative Commons Case Studies project. Seriously, this one has been touched by so many people for countless months now.

I remember when Mike Linksvayer wanted me to push this one out and TVOL and I sat in a room looking at each other like what the hell is this vague task Mike just gave us Well, it coalesced at the CC Taiwan

It also now helps me feel like the information side of Creative Commons infrastructure is pretty solid. I won’t say complete, but at least up to par with most projects of this size. To go along with this release, Alex and I shuffled around some of the /projects page at creativecommons.org and there is now a section called “Information” which is useful for all those seeking out about why use CC. Please all, feel free to use these sections.

Joi just blogged a chunk of the Case Studies blog post I did over at CC’s blog, which I’ve sourced below:

Creative Commons Launches Global Case Studies Project
Jon Phillips, June 24th, 2008
Brisbane, Australia & San Francisco, USA — 2008 June 24

Today Creative Commons (CC), in association with Creative Commons Australia, officially announced the release of the Case Studies Project, which is a large-scale community effort to encourage all to explore and add noteworthy global CC stories. Creative Commons provides free tools to allow copyright-holders to clearly show rights associated with creative works, and now this project shows how notable adopters like author Cory Doctorow, web video-sharing company Blip.tv, and open film project “A Swarm of Angels” have successfully used CC licenses.

And, Joi had this to say about the project:

This is a very important initiative and I hope everyone will contribute and use this resource. In order to make CC ubiquitous, we need support from businesses to get it integrated into the tools and the infrastructure. We need to prove that CC is not only good for society and culture, but makes business sense too. These case studies will be very important to help drive home the fact that sharing is good for business in addition to being “the right thing to do” in other respects.

This also helps make the case to creators that you sharing makes sense for professionals as well.

The next big projects to focus on are the Metrics project, PDWiki Projects (Open Library with CC/PD integration and PDRegistry.ca). No links you say! Well, they are mostly out there in the ether so you can do investigation to find out what these cool projects are that I’ve been working on for a couple of years, seriously!

SIDENOTE: For all you friends of Open Clip Art Library and ccHost, a few of us will be heading to Berkeley to meet at Mudrakers Cafe at 2 PM this Thursday, June 26, 2008 until whenever (~5 PM) to hack with legendary hacker, Victor Stone on ccHost 5.0, the engine behind ccMixter.org, Open Clip Art Library and Open Font Library. I want to do some code fun and not just my talky talk I do mostly these days.

Mike blogged about the ccHost 4.5 release for all you to update your sites to for stability right before the massively updated 5.0 arrives on the scene. If you have forgotten, ccHost is the engine behind Open Clip Art Library and Open Font Library (which both need developers). More info below:

Two new releases of ccHost today, the remix-oriented media hosting software that drives ccMixter:

4.5, the final release from the 4.x tree. 4.0 was released March 6 last year.

5.0beta is the code that has been running on ccMixter for several months (5.0alpha was available in February.) The missing piece needed to make 5.0 final is updated administrator documentation.

The software is licensed under the GPL and downloadable from sourceforge or our source repository.

Also, Asheesh packaged up liblicense 0.7 which is useful for all wanting to add licensing to your application. I want to get liblicense into a couple of applications like Eye of Gnome and something else fun. Any ideas open source developers? There are resources to help work on this at Creative Commons if you are interested in something fun:

I just released liblicense 0.7.0 on SourceForge. It fixes the Python bindings. They’ve been broken since the 0.6 release, it seems. Some functionality in them probably worked between 0.6 and 0.7, but (read on for more)…

LL_LICENSE and other constants were “extern const char” arrays before. Now they’re just lousy old #defines. This way, even though the strings might appear more than once in memory, it’s very simple for the IO modules like exempi.so to refer to those constants.

Before, due to dynamic linker loading order issues, if liblicense.so were added to a process’s memory memory map at runtime, if liblicense then tried to dlopen() its modules, the modules wouldn’t be able to find those constants. What a drag! That broke the Python bindings’ ability to use the modules.

Now, I guess that’s still true, but the modules don’t need actual symbols from liblicense anymore.

I noticed this issue in the process of creating and testing RPMs for Fedora. I had to bump the SONAME because this removes symbols from the library.

You can grab it on SourceForge, and perhaps soon in Fedora Rawhide.

I’ve been helping build Overlap.org for a couple of years now and the site is well up to spec. It aggregates feeds using feedwordpress, takes advantage of wordpress plugins quite extensively, and has had many bugs squashed (many more are to be found and fixed too ;).

The good news is that the site is well ready for more users and also, it has some really great content on it from live releases from the past Overlap events, and some custom releases as well from Willits and more.

What I’m most stoked about though right now is the addition of the Symbiosis podcast. I’ve been into dubstep for the last year or so, and am super super excited to have a killer podcast on Overlap.org pumping out dubstep to the masses. I’ve also learned a lot about dubstep and how nearly everyone from dubstep participates in dubstepforum.com. It would be great if this community could use ccHost to have a ccMixter-like site for collaboration on mixes, etc. Also, it would push this brilliant content over into the realm of Creative Commons-licensed content and also help it get adopted and licensed for commercial-use faster. (If anyone is interested in this, please do comment on this post and I’ll point ya in the right dir…)

If you haven’t gotten into it, download this podcast.