The term ‘open source’ has long been associated primarily with computer code. It refers to a software author’s choice to allow anyone to access the code of his or her work, and to modify and redistribute it as they see fit. With the introduction of the Creative Commons license in the past decade, these principles have spread to other types of work, including music, images, and now… movies?

Big Buck Bunny is a short, computer-animated film created by a talented group over at the Blender Institute. Upon the film’s release, all of its assets, including animation data, textures, and character models, will be released under the Creative Commons license. The complete finished film will be released under the same license. In short, this means anyone with the technical know-how will be able to take all of the data used to create the film and do whatever they want, or re-edit and tinker with the film as they see fit.

The film’s production has been financed through commercial sponsors, the Blender Foundation, Paypal donations, and DVD pre-sales. In a world of draconian digital rights management and often unnecessarily restrictive copyright laws, it is refreshing to witness open source principles spreading to new mediums.

Big Buck Bunny will premiere April 10th, 2008 at Cinema Studio K in Amsterdam. If you hail from the Netherlands or just so happen to be passing through, it might be worth checking out. Otherwise, the DVD can be pre-ordered through Blender’s e-Shop.

Click here to view Big Buck Bunny’s trailer

Also note: Elephants Dream was the world’s first open source animated film. It can be viewed in its entirety here.