Licensing and creative commons

How would you like your tree?

We're already having some questions on the blog about licensing for the graphic and associated assets. In short it's all available under some form of creative commons license, in one of two flavours:

The content currently up is all available under the license Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales (BY-NC-ND) which basically means you can use it but you can't make money off it and you can't mess with it (oh and please reference the site). If you're a teacher, work in a museum or are just an ordinary bod you can show it where you please.

Almost all of the ingredients will soon be available under (BY-NC-SA) which will allow remixes and so on. By ingredients we mean the animation *without* the voiceover and music and presenter. Also all of the images and animations that make it up and even the code that we used to generate it. You'll also be able to make and share your own trees. More on all of this later.

Tree of Life is live

The full six-minute video is now on the Tree of Life website. Don't forget to explore the interactive and sign up for updates.

Plants

We've already had some feedback about the lack of plants in the interactive tree. The key point is that what we've put up for now is pretty much the interactive version of the film. We used the same tools and data structures to build both. Obviously the film has its own narrative structure and logic, but the choice of species might make less sense when on its own in the interactive. This is the situation at launch but it will not be the case in the future.

We'll be posting here more fully about the history and future of the tree, and in particular I'll be blogging more extensively about mechanisms for updating and sharing soon.