Many types of open or general public licenses govern online collaborative spaces like wikis. The popular choices seem to fall under three categories: CopyLeft, Creative Commons, and Public Domain. All open licenses allow some use of content that would normally be covered by full copyright protection.

"We’ve just added the seal you see at right to Creative Commons licenses that qualify as Free Culture Licenses according to the Definition of Free Cultural Works — Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike. Public domain is not a license, but is an acceptable copyright status for free cultural works according to the Definition.

"Something significant has happened in the world of free licensing, Lessig has the details and a video. Apparently, an important step has been made towards interoperability between the license controlling Wikipedia articles (the GFDL v.1.2), and the CC license by-share-alike. (See also this post on the Creative Commons website)..."

The Creative Commons released LiveContent 2.0 a Free Live DVD. We checked it out and wanted to give you an overview of what it’s all about. Basically, it’s a Fedora Live DVD with free and open source content, that comes loaded with Creative Commons’ (CC) licensed material and all you favorite FOSS programs.

Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Our Content Commons contains educational materials for everyone — from children to college students to professionals — organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger collections or courses.

"The GNU Affero General Public License or GNU AGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation. The GNU AGPL is similar to the GNU General Public License, except that it has an additional section to cover use over a computer network. It closes what is commonly known as the Application service provider loophole of the GNU General Public License.

"...Arturo di Corinto, a sharp and ebullient Italian media activist, writer and film-maker, set out a bold vision of free software as a common resource: ‘Thanks to its characteristics, the free software is a distributed property that is capable of evolving into a common good’, he declared. [...] Can ideas, both inspirational metaphors and actual experiences, from the free software movement provide any guide for turning public services into commons?

"...It is this intensive effort at the private appropriation of knowledge that has created different movements of resistance. The free software movement, the movements of farmers against biopiracy in seeds and animal and vegetal types, where Western corporations are privatizing the fruits of thousands of year of communal cooperation; the movement of patients and developmental organizations for access to reasonably priced medicines and medical knowledge; the movement for free access to scientific publications, are all related reactions to these New Enclosures.

The big news for today is definitely open source licensing, with SugarCRM going GPLv3, the OSI approving SocialText’s Common Public Attribution License, BMC selecting the BSD license for its open source projects, and the newly re-named xTuple introducing yet another license.