Open Source Development - From Start to Finish
Open source, open content, open publishing...all different parts of the same idea - that innovation is enhanced when knowledge and beauty are shared. Constantly evolving through community cooperation, individual programmers as well as large corporations all contribute to the impressive achievements seen in the field of open source.
"Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in."
-Open Source Initiative: Mission Statement
Century Seven utilizes open-source development platforms in all of our production work, harnessing the bleeding edge of technology to produce outstanding results while avoiding unnecessary overhead due to proprietary licensing fees.
The software we use on our systems include:
- Linux Mint Debian Edition
- Bluefish Editor 2.0.3
- Aptana Studio 3.0
- Gimp 2.6
- Inkscape 0.48
- Blender 2.58
- Scribus 1.3.3.13
- Cinelerra CV 2.2
- Ardour 2.8.11
- DVDauthor 0.7.0
Creative Commons Licensing - The Elegance of Open Content
As information mediums have changed, so have the rules that govern their use. Intellectual property rights have adapted to the needs dictated by culture, and as a balance to restrictive copyright protections numerous alternatives have appeared on the landscape allowing creative works to be distributed with varying levels of copyright protection.
An immense amount of diverse media has been freely distributed for public use, providing a repository of creativity for designers and developers to harness. Century Seven utilizes Creative Commons Attribution Only licensed media to avoid royalty fees for our clients and ourselves.
Creative Commons content goes beyond graphics; music, movies, entire news sites, fiction, encyclopedias, travel guides, presentations, textbooks, scientific journals...the amount of content is staggering and gets larger everyday - Flickr has over 30 million images licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Only license.
All of the Creative Commons licensed content we use during development is given appropriate attribution and can be seen by clicking on the Creative Commons logo at the bottom of every page.
Creative Commons licensing offers an alternative to the standard copyright law, allowing an individual or entity to share their work, while still retaining certain rights. All Creative Commons Licenses require at minimum that the author be credited if their work is used (attribution).
As a set of legal notices that permit others to make certain uses of a creative work, a person could share their work under the legal notice that allows others distribute their work as long as they attribute the work correctly, link to their website, and don't exploit their work for profit. This is just one example of the flexibility that Creative Commons licenses give.
These are the four different types of Creative Commons Licenses that can be used in combination with one another:
| CC License | Conditions |
|---|---|
 BY |
Attribution - Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits in the manner specified by these. |
 NC |
Noncommercial - Licensees may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only for noncommercial purposes. |
 SA |
Share Alike - Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs the original work. |
 ND |
No Derivative Works - Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works based on it. |
