The Opencontent.org Debacle "OpenContent is officially closed. And that's just fine." With these words, www.opencontent.org welcomes its visitors since June 30th. Many of those who read them were less enthusiastic though. opencontent.org, after all, is the site which coined the whole term "open content", provided two popular licenses for it -- the "Open Content License" and the "Open Publication License" -- and functioned as a central resource for the idea that Free Software/Open Source philosophy could be used for any kind of digital work. Since the launch of opencontent.org in 1998, it had taken almost five years that the idea gained momentum through outstanding projects like Wikipedia , the increasingly useful collaborative online encyclopedia published under the GNU Free Documentation License, and a growing number of publications and community Internet projects using open content copylefts. There could hardly be a worse time for pulling the plug of opencontent.org, and the story of its demise alone was creating enough public relations damage to resemble other tactical, business-driven 'fear, uncertainty and doubt' campaigns against Free Software such as SCO's courtroom action against Linux or Microsoft's successful lobbying against an Open Source conference of the U.N.'s World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). Opencontent.org went online in spring 1998, just few weeks after the term "Open Source" had been invented by Linux advocates around Eric S. Raymond, author of the essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and later a disputed figure because of his right-wing gun-freak libertarianism. The coinage was a reaction to Netscape's decision of freeing its web browser sourcecode as it should replace the term "Free Software" propagated by the GNU project and its nonconformist head Richard M. Stallman, with an IT business-compatible buzzword. A perhaps accidental side-effect was that "Open Source" appealed to other net cultures and communities as well because it wasn't specific to software. The translation of "open source" into "open content" seemed logical, and was first made by David Wiley, at that time an educational computing specialist and web developer at Marshall University, West Virginia. His announcement on Slashdot.org documents where the project historically came from: "OpenContent is an attempt to take Content where GNU/FSF has taken Software. [...] If Slashdot readers have "educational" content they'd like to make freely available for others to use in its entirety (like HOW-TO docs, etc.) while still maintaining ownership and some assurance of proper recognition, they should check it out." Consequently, the "Open Content License" published on opencontent.org was a cut-and-paste of the GNU General Public License (GPL) which only lacked the former's preamble and appendix and had all mentions of "program" replaced with "OpenContent". In June 1999, the "Open Publication License" was released in addition. It allowed authors and publishers to restrict on the modification and commercial reprinting of their works. Drafted in collaboration with Free Software-friendly publishing companies, the Open Publication License has been widely adopted: Among others, computer handbooks by O'Reilly and Prentice Hall, university course material, periodicals like the "Linux Gazette" and political websites like www.spinsanity.com have been released under its terms; a Google search of "Open Publication License" currently yields 19200 results. What now seems to be the end of opencontent.org should in fact be a transformation. The site will superseded by the "Creative Commons" project in which Wiley has begun to work as a "Director of Educational Licenses". Founded in 2001 by Internet law expert Lawrence Lessig, "Creative Commons" is a general support platform for free information. It provides its own licensing scheme, in fact a toolkit of 12 different licenses, each of them providing a different combination of regulations for attribution, commercial use and modification of a work, thus covering all kinds of liberal distribution modes from Public Domain to GPL-style copyleft up to works which retain all attributes of classical copyright except for the permission to be circulated in the Internet. A web-based form makes it quite simple to choose a combination of Creative Commons license options. In turn, both the original "Open Content License" and the "Open Publication License" are no longer supported by its creator. While they still can be used, there is no organisation ensuring its compatibility to current legislation and defending it in court. Wiley's argument is that there never was, so that, as he writes, "Creative Commons is doing a better job of providing licensing options which will stand up in court." Indeed: Unlike the GNU GPL and its maintainance and support through the Free Software Foundation and Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen, opencontent.org neither had institutional support, nor legal expertise for its licenses, both of which Creative Commons has in abundance. If Creative Commons and its licensing scheme should become a similar focal point of Open Content activism as the GNU project for Free Software, it would also do away with the Babylonian confusion of mutually incompatible open content licensing schemes like the "Scientific Design License (SDL)", the "Open Music License", the "Open Audio License" of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the "Free Art License", and so on. The legal know-how of Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle and other Creative Commons directors along with their efforts to internationalize the Creative Commons licenses make the project appear more professional and, most importantly for open content providers, trustworthier than the previous alternatives. Still, issues remain: By publicly stalling opencontent.org and its licenses, Wiley did his best to show his refusal of taking up responsibility, instead of providing a sensible and smooth upgrade path from opencontent.org to Creative Commons. The existing Creative Commons "Attribution-ShareAlike" license for example could have simply acted as a "Open Content License v2.0", and a hypothetical "Open Publication License v2.0" could just be a pointer to the Creative Commons "Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0" license . Instead, Wiley opted for a major publicity desaster, risking for example to alienate and jeopardize people who had talked publishers or cultural and educational institutions into releasing work under the Open Publication License. While Wiley's probably intended to act responsibly and ground his project on a more solid foundation, the self-defacement of the opencontent.org homepage instead contributed to what many perceive to be the immaturity and instability of non-software copyleft. Part of that perception also stems from the fact that major open content licenses are incompatible to Free Software copylefts where they impose restrictions on modification and commercial use. Of the twelve Creative Commons licenses, for example, only four make works free in the sense of the Debian Free Software Guidelines, respectively Open Source according to the Open Source Definition. The original Open Publication License and, ironically, the GNU Free Documentation License (which allows invariable sections in documents) are plagued as well with this issue; the Debian project, the creator of Debian GNU/Linux, even considered moving all GNU FDL-licensed software documentation from its "main" into its "non-free" section. "OpenContent is dead. Long live OpenContent"; David Wiley's last words on opencontent.org tell the story in its full ambiguity. Florian Cramer