Open Clip Art Library

Greet Openclipart

The logo of Openclipart, a green pair of scissors
Type of site	Media repository
Created by	Jon Phillips, Bryce Harrington
Website	openclipart.org
Commercial	Yes
Registration	Required (to post/upload)
Launched	2004
Current status	Active
Content license	CC Zero 1.0 Unless noted, content is waived of all copyright and related or neighboring rights under this license.

Openclipart is a community and collection of vector clip art that is free content. The project's slogan is, "Openclipart is the largest community of artists making the best free original clipart for you to use for absolutely any reason."

The Openclipart library, sometimes abbreviated as OCAL (Open Clip Art Library), was started in early 2004 by Jon Phillips and Bryce Harrington, developers for vector graphics software Sodipodi, and later its fork, Inkscape. Openclipart initially grew out of a project started by Christian Schaller (Uraeus), who on October 26, 2003 issued a challenge on the Gnome Desktop website for users of Sodipodi to create a collection of flags in SVG format. The flag project progressed very well, resulting in a collection of over 90 flags made publicly available in SVG format, which lead to a broadening of the project goals to include generic clipart. The project became known as Openclipart by April 2004, with the stated aim of all contributed images being dedicated to the public domain.

In the early stages of the Openclipart project, a website was created that lacked thumbnails and was hard to browse. To help propagate the images in the library, downloadable Openclipart packages were released. These packages were available directly from the Openclipart website, or as an add-on for various Linux distributions including Fedora, or an NSIS installer for Windows. Each package included most of the clipart to date and were manually sorted into categories, a laborious process. The Openclipart package version 0.20 was released in 2010. The Openclipart packages received only a few more incremental updates during 2010, mostly for seasonal clipart.

An overhauled Openclipart 2.0 website went live as a beta in February 2010 with a full release in March 2010. The site introduced a change from the old ccHost software to the new AGPL-based Aiki Framework, a content management system made for Openclipart 2.0. The new site allowed anyone to browse and add to the Openclipart collection easily, and image thumbnails and improved search functions made the Openclipart library more accessible. These features contributed to increased use of the site, which was soon receiving over 5,000 unique visitors and 50,000 page views daily, and soon made the old packages redundant. This release culminated the work of Jon Phillips, Andy Fitzsimon, Bassel Safadi, Michi, Ronaldo Barbachano, and Brad Phillips who assisted in the launch of the new system.