Since I have been working on a thesis on Open Source Film business models, I had to answer the question what an Open Source Film actually is. So here is my definition, which has been created in agreement with Ton Roosendal (Blender Foundation), Stefan Kluge (VEB Film Leipzig) and Solomon Rothman (moviepals.org).


An Open Source Movie is a movie where:

1) The license of the movie is approved for Free Cultural Works. Specifically this is true for the Creative Commons licenses by and by-sa.

2) The materials used in the movie (sources) are also available under a license which is approved for Free Cultural Works.

3) The movie and its sources are made publicly available via an online download or by other means that are either free or with a cost that covers reasonable reproduction expenses only.

4) The sources should be viewable and editable with free/open source software. If this is not the case, they must be convertible into such a format by using free/open source software. The same applies to the movie itself.

5) It should be possible to re-create or re-assemble the movie using the source materials.

This definition is also available in the Wikipedia: [en.wikipedia.org]


Resources:

- Licenses which are approved for Free Cultural Works must meet the criteria of "Defining Free Culture Licenses" on freedomdefined.org.
- For the Creative Commons Licenses in question have a look at this article in the Wikipedia.

I think the only was a film qualifies as open source is if all the original footage and sound is free released under a cc license.

That is what I'm doing with my open source film

Well, not all CC licenses are qualified for open source projects because they put too many constraints on the usage of the material. That is for instance the case for all CC licenses which use the nc and nd attribute.