Fedora 7 has been chosen as the platform to showcase Creative Commons-licensed multimedia content.
SAN FRANCISCO—Windows Vista has probably created the single biggest opportunity for the Linux desktop to take market share, Cole Crawford, an IT strategist at Dell, said in an address titled, "The Linux Desktop—Fact, FUD or Fantasy?" at the annual LinuxWorld Conference & Expo here. For example, a number of companies have moved back to Windows XP after deploying Vista, Crawford said, before quoting Scott Granneman, an author, entrepreneur and adjunct professor at Washington University in St. Louis, as saying, "To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just have to work on it."
The Fedora 7 Linux distribution has been chosen as the platform for the Creative Commons LiveContent CD, an initiative to showcase free, open-source software and Creative Commons-licensed multimedia content.
The LiveContent CD is the result of collaboration across a number of organizations, including Red Hat, which is providing in-kind engineering support via Fedora 7, as well as software applications including OpenOffice, The Gimp, Inkscape, Firefox, multimedia viewers, open document templates and others from the community.
Worldlabel.com, a member of the Open Document Format Alliance, is supplying ongoing support for the development and distribution of the LiveContent CD.
Fedora 7, which is the result of community-based open-source collaboration, has a new build capacity that allows for the creation of custom distributions and individual appliances.
"Fedora 7 features a completely open-source build process that greatly simplifies the creation of appliances," said Jack Aboutboul, a community engineer for Fedora at Red Hat. "We encourage Fedora 7 users to create custom distributions that fit their individual needs and are excited that Creative Commons is making use of this capability within Fedora 7 to enable the liberation of content and provide free licensed software to all."
Fedora 7 boots directly from the LiveContent CD and uses open-source tools such as Revisor and Pungi. The CD features a variety of Creative Commons-licensed content, including audio, video, image, text and educational resources.
From the desktop, users can explore free and open content and learn more about businesses such as Jamendo, Blip.tv, Flickr and others supporting creative communities through aggregation and search tools.
"With the release of Fedora 7 and the opening up of our build process and tools such as Pungi and Revisor, we have tried to position Fedora as a true platform for innovation rather than just another Linux distribution," Aboutboul told eWEEK.
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"The purpose of the LiveContent distribution is to act as a tool and an enabler to educate people about what Creative Commons is and does, and to provide them with the tools and a selection of content with which they can begin to explore the remix culture," Aboutboul said.
Creative Commons needed a reliable, community-driven platform on which to base its content and already had a relationship with some of the engineers at Red Hat, according to Jon Phillips, a community and business developer at Creative Commons.
"We envision LiveContent to be a stepping stone to dynamic distribution of open content," he said. "Forthcoming versions of LiveContent aim to support auto curated packaging of Creative Commons-licensed content, allowing for the most up-to-date, 'living' content distribution. For this to happen, we're calling on community members and content curators to join the effort to help spread open media."
