Content Management Matters ™

Apparently the open source crowd isn't the only circle suffering from pinched toes, courtesy of Microsoft.

Becta, the education technology branch of the UK, has just filed a complaint with the Office of Fair Trading regarding Microsoft's "anticompetitive practices" in the academic software license sector.

After months of grueling work and legal battles, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has officially approved the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) originally submitted by Socialtext nine months ago. With CPAL on the OSI’s approved list of open source licenses, Socialtext can now carry the OSI-certified label and proudly call itself open source.

When a large corporate body and a suburban teen can use the same platform to air a great idea or persuasive stream of thought, what protects one or the other from negligence of source citation or outright content theft? It's harder to track information back to its origins when the origin itself can be added, edited, published and deleted on a whim.

Noting that the corporate machine might be slightly better able than the teen at navigating the complex world of content rights, Creative Commons came up with a solution as simple and fluid as the flow of information it is often meant to protect. And recently, the 3.0 version of said solution has been unwrapped.