"I think Operator is giving people a new way to interact with data on the Web," Kaply told InternetNews.com. "It's a variation on what some people call 'instant mashups.' The idea is that rather than having to rely on other people to integrate data on multiple Web sites via traditional mashups, tools like Operator can provide the end-user a way to instantly pass data between multiple Web sites."

Now anybody who's ever been in the tech world has likely heard of free software licenses such as the ever famous GPL, as well as other open source licensing systems. But far fewer have heard of Creative Commons.

Firefox operates under a tri licence and the addons for it are overwhelmingly free and open too. They empower the user and extend the browser. They help to put the user in control. Ubiquity does this in a way that makes web mashups creative fun and allows you to command the web, not just surf it, without any need to be a programming master of the universe.

An idea that is suggested every now and then is to look at software licensing and give it a kind of “Creative Commons” feel; that is, present the terms of the license in a pleasant and orderly way by means of icons. We’ll take the top 10 licenses and for each, label it with icons

If Creative Commons (CC) has any say in the matter, the Web will soon have a standard machine-readable notation for licenses. Named the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL), the notation has been under development for the last few years, partly with the cooperation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3).

"Paradoxically, the viral clause, the part of the GPL licensing framework that so many people objected to because it wasn't business friendly, made the license business friendly - in the future, a license that liberates business from the drug of DRM and the prison of software patents may turn out to have been equally prescient and business friendly..."

"Recently, the Wikimedia Foundation proposed that the copyright licensing terms on its wikis be changed to include a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license in addition to its longstanding GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The proposal was approved by a 75 percent majority of community voters as announced this week..."

For some time now, I've found the Creative Commons philosophy morally troubling in a way that the free software philosophy isn't, without being able to satisfactorily articulate precisely why.

"Interesting article in LinuxWorld about the future of free software by Eben Moglen... «...If you’ve become dependent on a commons for whatever role in your business, then what you need is commons management. You don’t strip-mine the forest; you don’t fish every fish out of the sea. And, in particular, you become interested in conservation and equality. You want the fish to remain in the sea, and you don’t want anybody else overfishing. So you get interested in how the fisheries are protected...» ..."