Congratulations to the team at Creative Commons on the launch of their first two projects: machine-readable licenses you can use for creative work to ensure certain rights of both the creator and licensee, and Founders' Copyright, a kind of copyright license that guarantees the release of a work to the public domain after 14 years (the original term set in the 1790 copyright law).

O'Reilly & Associates' involvement with Creative Commons and their pledge to release some of their works using the Founders' Copyright is particularly interesting given the technical nature of their publications. It's great to see a publisher support Founders' Copyright and Creative Commons, and especially great that information about technology, a greatly empowering force, is what is being returned to the people. But will the technology described in O'Reilly texts be useful to the public in 14 years?

The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is yes. O'Reilly has been publishing for over 14 years, and many ubiquitous, standardized and refined technologies have not changed much in that time. Checking C Programs with lint (1st ed.) is 14 years old and still sold in bookstores. Maybe not the best example (I think most compilers now cover most of lint's functionality), but it's easy to see the usefulness of having quality texts of similarly "old" subjects in the public domain. C is over 30 years old (and standardized for 13; ANSI ratified 12/14/1989), and I write it for a living.