Open ICEcat

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Open ICEcat is an Open Content project under the Open Content License in which a worldwide open catalogue is created for product information. Editors are participating manufacturers. The users of the product content are distributors, resellers, retailers, comparison websites or online shopping directories, enterprise resource planning systems or the manufacturers themselves.

Open ICEcat began formally in December 2005 with 20 participating IT manufacturers. Among the earliest contributors are Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Fujitsu-Siemens, IBM and Lenovo. As of March 2007, this number has grown to more than 90 manufacturers, including participants from consumer electronics like Sony, Philips and Kodak, and the telecom industry. On the user side, similar growth has been seen.

Open ICEcat is interesting because it demonstrates that the Open Content concept is not only relevant for public domain projects like Wikipedia, but also for commerce-related projects. This is analogous to the move of open source applications like Apache, Linux and MySQL into the world of commerce, which marked an increased professional acceptance level.