Via the “O’Reilly Radar”:http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/02/yahoo_open_sources_uis_and_des.html I saw that Yahoo (excuse me, _”Yahoo!”_) has released two new assets for developers: a UI library and a design pattern library. So the “UI library”:http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/ isn’t that interesting to me — I haven’t done enough DHTMLAJAX programming to really figure out what to look for in a toolkit. And the “Design Patterns”:http://developer.yahoo.net/ypatterns/ are probably only interesting if you’re doing dynamic web stuff.
But there are couple of things that really impress me. First, the design patterns all provide information on how accessibility issues should be handled. Sure, its prescriptive rather than descriptive, but even formalizing what _should_ happen is a good thing — a sign of a maturing technology is stabilized idioms, right?
Second, both are liberally licensed; the UI library under a “BSD License”:http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/license.txt and the design patterns under the most liberal “CC(Creative Commons)”:http://creativecommons.org license — “Attribution 2.5″:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/. My opinions on software licensing are evolving, but lately I really appreciate it when authors give *me* more rights to reuse their work in a manner I wish. Bravo, Yahoo!.
I agree, this move is a good one. It also gives CC more headlines which is also important. Things are really picking up in terms of CC license usage!
Mitch