Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Jon Phillips <jon AT rejon.org>]

All sounds good, but I think best to channel these ideas onto the wiki
and roadmap. Rafael, can your team help with some of these todos and
give good feedback.

Cheers!

Jon

On Wed, 2007-08-29 at 22:46 -0700, Jason Kivlighn wrote:
> We're looking at various different use-cases, all of which should be
> handled separately.  I want to be sure we're clear on which use-cases
> we're dealing with and discussing here.  All cases should be handled,
> and handling one case shouldn't interfere with another.
> 
> 1) Selecting a license for a file from within a file manager (i.e.
> Dolphin or Nautilus).  We could be dealing with any type of content --
> source code, content/media, etc -- so being able to select the right
> class of license based on the file type makes sense.
> 
> 2) Selecting a license from within a specific application, i.e.
> KOffice.  When KOffice offers the user a choice of licenses, we can
> safely assume that we want to offer content licenses (like CC).  We
> don't need to offer the GPL  or other source code license as a choice. 
> No automation based on file type is required.
> 
> 3) In the case of using liblicense with KNewStuff, a license is
> potentially selected for a collection of files.  This is the case where
> what is being fetched is a tarball or zip.  We can't go by the file
> type, since the tarball may be a collection of CC-licensed photos, or an
> application licensed under the Artistic License.  The user should
> explicitly specify whether it's content, source code, or something else.
> 
> I like the idea of extending the license metadata (the RDF) to include a
> "class" element which specifies whether it's a license recommended for
> source code, content, or some other class.  This is the most generic
> solution.  An application could ask for licenses from a particular
> class.  Or if appropriate, it could determine for itself which license
> class to choose from based on a mime-type.  Liblicense could even
> include a set of known file type to license class mappings to ease in
> the frontend implementation.
> 
> Given all of the above, I think liblicense should make it easy to create
> two types of license choosers: 1) a frontend license chooser that is
> content-based, like we currently ship.  And 2) It should also make it
> easy to create a general license chooser that covers source code
> licensing and everything else.  This could simply present a list of
> licenses to choose from, while providing additional info describing each
> license.  One might consider an attribute-based license chooser, like
> the current one for content, that would be used to license source code
> -- but given the intricacies among source code licenses, it just doesn't
> make sense and couldn't possibly be accurate.  Choosing between the two
> types would be up to the application to decide -- an application can do
> what makes sense for the current context (i.e. the 3 contexts above).
> 
> Okay, enough rambling.  I'm just throwing out bottled-up, random,
> thoughts.  Maybe I'm over-complicating things.
> 
> Cheers,
> Jason
> 
> > Hi all,
> >
> >   
> >> Possible, yes... I just want to point out that we'd first have to extend
> >> the API and license RDF to specify "classes" of licenses.  That way
> >> liblicense knows which license is which class (content, source code,
> >> documentation, etc.).
> >>     
> >
> > I suggest somehow that the allowed licenses are determined
> > automatically by the system. Well, KDE knows what kind of file it is.
> > Why put a radio button or a combo if it can be done automatically ?
> >
> > There should be a "database" that says for each filetype what licenses
> > are supported.
> >
> >
> > Bye,
> > Rafael Fernández López.
> >   
> 
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-- 
Jon Phillips

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