[2] The Openclipart library (OCAL) was established in early 2004 by Jon Phillips and Bryce Harrington, who had worked together to develop the open-source vector graphics suites Sodipodi and its successor, Inkscape.

The project became known as Openclipart by April 2004, with the stated aim of making all its contributed images freely available in the public domain.

[6][7][8][9][10][excessive citations] In the early stages of the Openclipart project, the website lacked thumbnails and was difficult to browse.

[16] The site introduced a change from the old ccHost software to the new AGPL-based Aiki Framework,[17] a content management system made for Openclipart 2.0.

[18][19] The 3.0 website release incorporated allowed members to "favorite" clip art, and provided an image-editing feature that made image remixing significantly easier.

][20] On March 12, 2014, Openclipart announced that Inkpad, an open-source drawing app for iPads, had released library integration to make the entire collection available to its users.