Openclipart is an online media repository of free contentvectorclip art. The project bills itself as "the largest community of artists making the best free original clipart for you to use for absolutely any reason." All of Openclipart's content is public domain due to expired copyright, failing to reach the threshold of originality, or having been deeded into the public domain to the greatest legal extent possible by its owners. The website was unavailable for a period beginning in April 2019. Access to the library via other means was still possible, including partial copies of the library that were posted on several mirrors. The site's search feature was restored in May 2020.
History
The Openclipart library, sometimes abbreviated as OCAL, started in early 2004 by Jon Phillips and Bryce Harrington who were developers for a vector graphics software called Sodipodi and later for Inkscape. Openclipart initially grew out of a project started by Christian Schaller, 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 and 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 which lacked thumbnails and was difficult 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 they 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. Image thumbnails and improved search functions made the Openclipart library more user friendly. These features contributed to increased use of the site, which was soon receiving over 5,000 unique visitors and 50,000 page views daily, making the old packages redundant. This release was the culmination of the work of Jon Phillips, Andy Fitzsimon, Bassel Safadi, Michi, Ronaldo Barbachano, and Brad Phillips, who assisted in the launch of the new system. The 3.0 website release incorporated a "favoriting" feature, allowing members to make note of their favorite clip art, and an image-editing option that makes the remixing of images significantly easier. On April 15, 2013, Openclipart launched a new logo and updated website design using a "scissors" logo. On March 12, 2014, Openclipart announced that Inkpad, an open-source drawing app for Apple iPad, released library integration to make the entire collection available to artists.
Lockdown and attempts at mirroring the library
On April 19, 2019, the site was taken offline by what was initially reported as a distributed denial-of-service attack. Jon Philips, one of the site's founders, appeared to be a victim of identity theft, making it unclear whether the earlier reports of a DDoS attack were true. All pages on OpenClipart.org were redirected to a page asking users to donate money "to support protection." The message was updated on December 25, 2019, with a statement that the site was being "gifted to the community" and that new files could once again be uploaded to the library. Using scraping, 156,000 images, constituting the vast majority of the library, were recovered and put up on FreeSVG.org. A second mirror was established at FreeSVGClipArt.com, taking advantage of the clips' lack of licensing restrictions. In early May of 2020, the website's Twitter account announced that the search feature had been re-enabled.
Some Linux distributions, including Mandriva and Ubuntu, include many of the Openclipart collection releases packaged as SVG, PNG or OpenDocument format files. These distributions are based on the 2005 pre-ccHost release since regular releases stopped after the switch to ccHost software. Openclipart 0.19, the first version released after the switch, was released in March 2009. With the recent release of version 2.0 and updated packages, distributions have bugs filed in their respective bug trackers to begin packaging Openclipart once more. Openclipart was included on the cover discs in Linux Format issues 123 and 132 as a package of browseable SVG files from the Openclipart collection.
