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Updated on December 10, 2021
Yes, it’s true. One of the long-time mainstays of Microsoft Office, the stock clip art, is going the way of Clippy. Microsoft’s dropping support for clip art in Office, arguing that nobody’s using it anymore, and the images included were outdated. Its replacement? Built-in use of Bing to search for images filtered for Creative Commons licenses.
Microsoft’s move is a win for Creative Commons licensing, by incorporating it directly into one the most used pieces of software on the planet. It also is a win for Bing’s search engine profile. This is surely welcome news for Creative Commons supporters, especially after Yahoo’s Flickr-related plans for its Creative Commons images (that’s legal, but dubious in terms of user goodwill).
I’ve written about sources of images for wallpaper in a previous post, but there’s also plenty of online clip art repositories available. One such clip art site I’ve used is Openclipart, an archive of public domain-declared clip art available to anyone. It’s where the laptop in my site’s logo comes from.
