About Metacommons
Philosophy
Creativity thrives when everybody shares. Creators of true innovation should be rewarded if their invention is widely used. These concepts are often presented in opposition, but at Metacommons, they're given equal weight.
The Idea
Metacommons is the first resource of its kind, dedicated to providing an environment where advanced digital media developers and artists can help each other remove obstacles and get rewarded in the process.
History
Metacommons was conceived in 2005, during the format discovery phase of HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc, when several professionals, many in competition, began to share code and conventions out of necessity just to make their dates. A brutal format war meant twice the learning curve for application engineers authoring new layers of interactive, networked media applications. They discovered that making proprietary technology accessible and fairly priced, while mutually sharing non proprietary knowledge, would lead to overall benefit.
These media professionals saw the need for common code that corresponds to common viewer scenarios, and in 2006 founded the Media Experience Trade Association (META), which was dedicated to usability standards in digital media interface design. The META was merged into the DVD Association in 2007, and the META standards have been incorporated into the Certification Criteria Committee.
Metacommons was born in January of 2008, and aims to automate the success of the ad hoc system built during the format wars, and then build from there. Metacommons seeks to aggregate and distribute the best conventions for the best viewer experiences, and make them free or affordable to all developers.
Projects
Media development projects are the purpose of Metacommons. A project can be as simple as a widget or control, or as complex as an entire media navigation system. Or maybe it's an just an algorithm. If you created something to aide the design of digital media, and you think it would be useful to somebody else in the field, then it would probably make a good project.
Contributor Accounts
Browsing Projects is anonymous, but contributing requires an account. Creating a contributor account is free and easy. It requires only a valid e-mail address for anti-spam authentication.
Public Projects
Anybody with a contributor account can start a public Project for free.
Commercial Projects
Anybody with a contributor account can apply to start a Commercial Project for sale at Metacommons.
About Project Maintenance
Contributors are responsible for maintaining their projects, and for the content of the projects. If a contributor is no longer able to maintain a project they started, they must find another contributor to maintain it, or it will be deleted by the site administrator. If a project contains content or technology that is not legal for distribution through Metcommons, it will be deleted by the site administrator.
About Licensing
Projects may include free or purchasable components. Generally, you can modify and release the project components on commercial and noncommercial derivative works. Some projects are distributed under an End-User Licensing Agreement (EULA) supplied by the contributor. Some pay-per-download projects may contain components distributed under public or Creative Commons license. Projects are distributed on an "AS IS" basis, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. Please be sure to see the License Agreement included with a Project for the specific language governing rights and limitations under the License Agreement.
At Metacommons, many technology licenses carry the Mozilla Public License Version 1.1. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/. Many creative works carry the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/.
Metacommons is owned and operated by Metabeam Corporation.