Ourproject.org is a web-based collaborative

free content 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 for which there are very minimal copyright and other legal limi ...

repository. It acts as a central location for the construction and maintenance of social/cultural/artistic projects, providing web space and tools, and focusing in

free knowledge Open knowledge (or free knowledge) is knowledge that is free to use, reuse, and redistribute without legal, social, or technological restriction. Open knowledge organizations and activists have proposed principles and methodologies related to the ...

. It claims to extend the ideas and methodology of

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

to social areas and

free culture The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content, otherwise known as open content. They encourage creators to create such content by using ...

in general. Since September 2009, Ourproject is under the

Comunes Association Comunes is a nonprofit organization aiming to encourage the commons and facilitating grassroots work through free software web tools. Previously known as Ourproject.org, this collective established itself as a legal entity in 2009, forming Com ...

umbrella, and gave birth to the Kune collaborative social network for groups.

Philosophy

Ourproject was founded in 2002 with the aims of hosting and boosting the cooperative work done in multiple domains (cultural, artistic, educational), with one specific condition: the results of the projects should remain freely accessible under a

free license A free license or open license is a license that allows copyrighted work to be reused, modified, and redistributed. These uses are normally prohibited by copyright, patent or other Intellectual property (IP) laws. The term broadly covers '' fr ...

. This is understood in a broad way, as not all the available licenses are cataloged as free/libre (such as several Creative Commons licenses). Its non-profit perspective is partially imposed on its online community of projects, as no advertising is allowed in the hosted webpages. Thus, Ourproject projects have mainly been carried out by social movements, university-supported groups, some free software related projects, cooperatives, artist collectives, activist groups, informal groups and non-profits.

Current situation/Condition

As of December 2016, Ourproject.org was hosting 1,733 projects and had 5,969 users, with a constant linear growth rate. and had a PageRank of 6 and the 14th position on public

Gforge GForge is a commercial service originally based on the Alexandria software behind SourceForge, a web-based project management and collaboration system which was licensed under the GPL. Open source versions of the GForge code were released from ...

sites, being the first of them not restricted to just free software projects. In fact, the

GNU Project The GNU Project ( ) is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and Computer hardware, computing dev ...

highlights it as "Free knowledge & free culture" project. It claims to be the most successful wiki farm with full free version and without ads (

comparison Comparison or comparing is the act of evaluating two or more things by determining the relevant, comparable characteristics of each thing, and then determining which characteristics of each are similar to the other, which are different, and t ...

). It has presence especially in Spain, Latin America and China. Relevant projects that are using Ourproject infrastructure include: * the

Critical Mass In nuclear engineering, critical mass is the minimum mass of the fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction in a particular setup. The critical mass of a fissionable material depends upon its nuclear properties (specific ...

movement pages reference for the Hispanic movement * The Spanish cooperative for

Organic farming Organic farming, also known as organic agriculture or ecological farming or biological farming,Labelling, article 30 o''Regulation (EU) 2018/848 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 2024 on organic production and labelling of ...

"Bajo el Asfalto está la Huerta", reference in the

food sovereignty Food sovereignty is a food system in which the people who produce, distribute, and consume food also control the mechanisms and policies of food production and Food distribution, distribution. This stands in contrast to the present corporate Agr ...

movement * the Kune project, a federated collaborative social network * the main Free Software association of

Argentina Argentina, officially the Argentine Republic, is a country in the southern half of South America. It covers an area of , making it the List of South American countries by area, second-largest country in South America after Brazil, the fourt ...

* The community website of the Ubuntu Spanish community * the internal work group of the P2P Foundation. During 2011, it has attracted interest by the new wave of protesting social movements in several areas: * It has hosted several projects related to the

Arab Spring The Arab Spring () was a series of Nonviolent resistance, anti-government protests, Rebellion, uprisings, and Insurgency, armed rebellions that spread across much of the Arab world in the early 2010s. It began Tunisian revolution, in Tunisia ...

movements from

Lebanon Lebanon, officially the Republic of Lebanon, is a country in the Levant region of West Asia. Situated at the crossroads of the Mediterranean Basin and the Arabian Peninsula, it is bordered by Syria to the north and east, Israel to the south ...

Palestine Palestine, officially the State of Palestine, is a country in West Asia. Recognized by International recognition of Palestine, 147 of the UN's 193 member states, it encompasses the Israeli-occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and th ...

and

Syria Syria, officially the Syrian Arab Republic, is a country in West Asia located in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. It borders the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Turkey to Syria–Turkey border, the north, Iraq to Iraq–Syria border, t ...

. * The social movement of

2011 Spanish protests The anti-austerity movement in Spain, also referred to as the 15-M Movement ( Spanish: ''Movimiento 15-M''), and the Indignados Movement, was a series of protests, demonstrations, and occupations against austerity policies in Spain that began a ...

repeatedly used its services. * The American

Occupy movement The Occupy movement was an international populist Social movement, socio-political movement that expressed opposition to Social equality, social and economic inequality and to the perceived lack of real democracy around the world. It aimed primar ...

is recommending its use in its

howto How to or how-to (among other spellings) may refer to: * A user guide ** An owner's manual, more narrowly * A tutorial ** Especially, instructional material created for the do it yourself market In titles of specific works * ''How to...'' (film ...

and it recently began being used.

Software used

Ourproject.org uses a multi-language multiple-topic adapted version of

FusionForge GForge is a commercial service originally based on the Alexandria software behind SourceForge, a web-based project management and collaboration system which was licensed under the GPL. Open source versions of the GForge code were released from 2 ...

. Its aim is to widen the spectrum of

ideals, focusing on free social and cultural projects more than on free software. Thus, its software was originally a kind of social and multiple-topic

forge A forge is a type of hearth used for heating metals, or the workplace (smithy) where such a hearth is located. The forge is used by the smith to heat a piece of metal to a temperature at which it becomes easier to shape by forging, or to the ...

following the

free-culture movement The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content, otherwise known as open content. They encourage creators to create such content by using ...

. Nowadays, the Ourproject community has been involved in the development of the collaborative environment Kune and eventually this would cover all current Ourproject functionalities.

Licenses allowed

The main condition for hosting projects at OP is that the content created during the project must be released under one of these licenses: *

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

, Attribution *

, Attribution-ShareAlike *

, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike *

GNU Free Documentation License The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or GFDL) is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights ...

(GFDL) *

Open Publication License The Open Publication License (OPL) was published by the Open Content Project in 1999 as a public copyright license for documents. It superseded the Open Content License, which was published by the Open Content Project in 1998. Starting around 20 ...

* Libre Designs General Public License (LDGPL) * Design Science License *

Free Art License The Free Art License (FAL) () is a copyleft license that grants the right to freely copy, distribute, and transform creative works except for computer hardware and software, including for commercial use. History The license was written in Ju ...

Artistic License Artistic license (and more general or contextually-specific, derivative terms such as creative license, poetic license, historical license, dramatic license, and narrative license) refers to deviation from fact or form for artistic purposes. It ...

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

(GPL) *

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

(LGPL) *

GNU Affero General Public License The GNU Affero General Public License (GNU AGPL) is a free, copyleft license published by the Free Software Foundation in November 2007, and based on the GNU GPL version 3 and the ''Affero General Public License'' (non-GNU). It is intended fo ...

(AGPL) *

BSD License BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lic ...

Mozilla Public License The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird. The MPL is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns of bo ...

Public Domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

* No license

Services

OP provides several free Internet services to free/libre projects collaborators: * Web hosting with subdomain (projectname).ourproject.org or

Virtual Hosting Virtual hosting is a method for hosting multiple domain names (with separate handling of each name) on a single server (or pool of servers). This allows one server to share its resources, such as memory and processor cycles, without requiring a ...

* Mailing list * Web Forums *

SSH The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH Protocol) is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Its most notable applications are remote login and command-line execution. SSH was designed for Un ...

account for full customization *

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

database * permanent file archival (

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

) * Wiki * Web-administration * E-mail Alias @users.ourproject.org * Periodical full backups * For software projects: SCM ( CVS, SVN) Other secondary services: * Task management * News service * Documentation management * Surveys * Registering * File publication system * Stats

Partners

Ourproject developed partnership with several organizations: * GRASIA (Group of Software Agents, Engineering & Applications): Research group of

Universidad Complutense de Madrid The Complutense University of Madrid (, UCM; ) is a public research university located in Madrid. Founded in Alcalá in 1293 (before relocating to Madrid in 1836), it is one of the oldest operating universities in the world, and one of Spain's ...

, it is offering joint grants to students and providing hardware resources. *

American University of Science and Technology The American University of Science and Technology (AUST; ) is a private, non-sectarian, and co-educational American university in Lebanon. It was established in 1989 in Beirut, under the name of the ''American Universal College'' through Decr ...

(Beirut): offering students the chance of collaborating with Ourproject receiving trainings in administration, or framing their senior project and Master theses in this environment. * IEPALA Foundation: It has joined Ourproject, together with other

initiatives, to build a common

Data Center A data center is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. Since IT operations are crucial for busines ...

. * Xsto.info:

Free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

cooperative A cooperative (also known as co-operative, coöperative, co-op, or coop) is "an autonomy, autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned a ...

that has been providing technical infrastructure to Ourproject without charge, and recently joined the mentioned collective Data Center.

References

External links

* {{Official website Project hosting websites Creative Commons-licensed websites Collaborative projects Internet properties established in 2002 Social networks for social change Wiki farms Multilingual websites Web service providers Creative Commons Knowledge markets