Event Report: Creative Commons 6th Birthday and Salon

Last night was the 6th birthday celebration for Creative Commons. As 10gen is released under open source licensing, we have similar views about the benefits that openness and collaboration can bring. There were several interesting presentations of CC licensed software.

Limebits runs using client-side JavaScript and WebDAV. They're promoting the sharing of web code - applications, games, blogs, etc. All freely copyable and extensible.

A special treat for me was to see Spot present Electric Sheep. (More specifically he presented Dreams in High Fidelity), but he talked a lot about Electric Sheep which has been my favorite screen saver for several years. It's easily the most beautiful I've seen, but that's not what makes it cool. It's actually a distributed computing app (like SETI@home) which uses genetic algorithms to formulate the next "sheep" (mathematical models). The fitness function of the algorithm is human. People vote up or down (roman style) on whether they like the sheep currently displaying during their screen saver. The higher rated sheep then breed (including cross-over and mutation) to create the next gen offspring. Scott lamented the effects of this - where the most popular sheep are fast moving, flashy, & colorful ("vegas sheep"), and are not the kind he prefers. It was great speaking with Scott after his presentation about grouping voters by their interests into 'flocks' and allowing them to develop sheep according to their own preferences (or even developing them solo).

Sarah Elizabeth Foster and company performed three songs including "Happy Birthday" for CC (which I thought was insane as it's copywritten!). I enjoyed hearing her discuss her trepedation about giving up her writes to her music as an artist. I hope it works out for her.

Michael Galpert from Aviary.com presented their software. I'm not sure how this got passed my radar, but I was very impressed with it's functionality, smoothness, and philosophy. If you're interested in graphic design, you've got to check it out. Rumor is that they're working on a CC licensed version of ProTools. That got my audiophile friends drooling. Aviary believes in education, and their site is chock full of tutorials and examples.

All in all, it was an interesting evening, and exciting to see more of the activity going on in the city.