Sun Microsystems hosted the first Open Media Commons (OMC) Workshop March 15-16, 2006 to further the community's goal of developing open, royalty-free digital rights management (DRM) and codec standards. In conjunction with the workshop and building on the announcement last year of Sun Labs' Project DReaM (DRM/everywhere available), Sun released two draft specifications for content protection technologies —DReaM-CAS (Conditional Access System) and DReaM-MMI (Mother May I). Sun also released open source code for a prototype implementation of the DReaM-CAS conditional access system. More than 80 participants from a range of organizations came together to discuss new technical specifications and source code, define plans for the completion of those specifications and determine the next steps required to develop an open, royalty-free DRM solution.

Open Media Commons is an open-source community project to develop royalty-free codecs and digital rights management (DRM) solutions. The goals of the Open Media Commons are to develop an open-source, royalty-free solution for the distribution of digital content, focused on authenticating people and roles, not just devices; to address the application of DRM technology to a wide range of content and situations, including personal rights management, the privacy of health records and compliance management for businesses dealing with Sarbanes-Oxley; and to create an open environment where creators, content owners, consumers, network operators, technology providers and consumer electronics device manufacturers can work together to address the technical problems associated with DRM.