 | |
 | |
Type of site | Search engine |
|---|---|
| Available in | Multilingual |
| Owner | WordPress Foundation [1] |
| URL | openverse |
| Current status | Active |
| Written in | JavaScript, Python |
Openverse is an open-source search engine for open content developed as part of the WordPress project. [2] [3] [4] It searches Creative Commons licensed and public domain content from dozens of different sources. [5] The software is licensed under the MIT License. [6]
Openverse indexes over 700 million items. [7]
In February 2017 Creative Commons announced CC Search, an open source search engine for open content, and released a beta version. [8] [9] A stable version of CC Search appeared in April 2019. [10] [9]
In December 2020, after Creative Commons staff changes, CC Search and a few other projects no longer had the necessary staff capacity. Those services went into maintenance mode, with the services remaining available while development was suspended. [11] [9]
In April–May 2021, Catherine Stihler (Creative Commons) and Matt Mullenweg (WordPress Foundation, Automattic Inc.) announced that CC Search joined the WordPress project. [12] [13] [14] Automattic hired key members of the CC Search team and sponsors their contributions to the project as part of the Five for the Future initiative. [13] A new name was also introduced, Openverse. [15] Openverse is the successor to CC Search, and is developed from the same code base of CC Search. It aims to be a broader open content search engine, continue development work and expand features. [15] The WordPress Foundation owns the Openverse trademark and its other intellectual property rights. [16] In December 2020, the CC Search domain name was redirected to Openverse. [17]
In January 2022, Openverse launched a redesigned user interface and support for searching audio files. [18]
In February 2023, Openverse moved to the domain https://openverse.org and refreshed the user interface: adding a search history for recent searches. [19] In September 2023, Openverse won the OE Awards for Excellence in Open Infrastructure. [20]
Openverse searches content from over 45 different media sources, including Wikimedia Commons, Europeana, and Flickr. [21] [5]
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
WordPress is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, mailing lists and Internet forum, media galleries, membership sites, learning management systems, and online stores. Available as free and open-source software, WordPress is among the most popular content management systems – it was used by 43.1% of the top 10 million websites as of December 2023.
Matthew Charles Mullenweg is an American entrepreneur and web developer. He is known for developing WordPress and founding Automattic.
XWiki is a free and Open source wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis on extensibility. XWiki is an enterprise wiki. It includes WYSIWYG editing, OpenDocument-based document import/export, annotations and tagging, and advanced permissions management.
In blogging, a ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. An XML-RPC signal is sent from the weblog to one or more Ping servers, as specified by originating weblog), to notify a list of their "Services" of new content on the weblog.
WordPress.com is a web building platform for self-publishing that is popular for blogging and other works. It is owned and operated by Automattic, Inc. It is run on a modified version of the WordPress software. This website provides free blog hosting for registered users and is financially supported via paid upgrades, "VIP" services and advertising.
Automattic Inc. is an American global distributed company which was founded in August 2005 and is most notable for WordPress.com, as well as its contributions to WordPress. The company's name is a play on founder Matt Mullenweg's first name and the word "automatic".
Akismet is a service that filters spam from comments, trackbacks, and contact form messages. The filter operates by combining information about spam captured on all participating sites and then using those spam rules to block future spam. Akismet is offered by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. Akismet was launched on October 25, 2005.
Public-domain-equivalent license are licenses that grant public-domain-like rights and/or act as waivers. They are used to make copyrighted works usable by anyone without conditions, while avoiding the complexities of attribution or license compatibility that occur with other licenses.
Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of creative work, such as a work of art, a book, a software program, or any other creative content unrestricted by copyright and other legal limitations on use. These are works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and/or modified, by anyone, for any purpose, including, in some cases, commercial purposes. Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the definition of free cultural work.
Creative Commons is maintaining a content directory wiki of organizations and projects using Creative Commons licenses. On its website CC also provides case studies of projects using CC licenses across the world. CC licensed content can also be accessed through a number of content directories and search engines.
Open Game Art is a media repository intended for use with free and open source software video game projects, offering open content assets.
The Open English Bible (OEB) is a freely redistributable modern translation based on the Twentieth Century New Testament translation. A work in progress, with its first publication in August 2010, the OEB is edited and distributed by Russell Allen. It is licensed with a Creative Commons zero license, which allows free use of the content and allows forking of the content and a new translation to be made based on it. Its name and the distribution of all text and related software through GitHub reinforce the open source approach.
OpenStax is a nonprofit educational technology initiative based at Rice University. Since 2012, OpenStax has created peer-reviewed, openly-licensed textbooks, which are available in free digital formats and for a low cost in print. Most books are also available in Kindle versions on Amazon.com and in the iBooks Store. OpenStax's first textbook was College Physics, which was published online, in print, and in iBooks in 2012. OpenStax launched OpenStax Tutor Beta in June 2017, adaptive courseware based on cognitive science principles, machine learning, and OpenStax content. However, it was announced in October 2022 that Tutor was being discontinued.
Ryan Merkley was the Chief of Staff to the office of the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, and former CEO of the American non-profit organization Creative Commons. He is an advocate for open licenses, net neutrality and open data initiatives in the public sector. Merkley is the Chair of the Open Worm Foundation board of directors and was trustee at the Quetico Foundation. He writes and speaks on issues such as the sharing economy, academic publishing and legal infrastructure for sharing content.
The Unlicense is a public domain equivalent license for software which provides a public domain waiver with a fall-back public-domain-like license, similar to the CC Zero for cultural works. It includes language used in earlier software projects and has a focus on an anti-copyright message.
The fediverse is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other using a common protocol. Users of different websites can send and receive status updates, multimedia files and other data across the network. The term fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
ActivityPub is a protocol and open standard for decentralized social networking. It provides a client-to-server API for creating and modifying content, as well as a federated server-to-server (S2S) protocol for delivering notifications and content to other servers. ActivityPub has become the main standard used in the fediverse, a popular network used for social networking that consists of software such as Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube.
