Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>]

On Sat, Apr 2, 2011 at 12:02 PM, Raghav Sethi <raghavsethi.rs@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I'm an undergrad studying Information Technology at IIIT-Delhi, India and would love nothing better than to work with Creative Commons for GSoC 2011.

Great! :-)
 

I checked out the project motivation (http://labs.creativecommons.org/2011/03/21/cc-gsoc-integration-is-the-word/) and the project ideas at (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Developer_Challenges). I'd like to work on the 'Build Creative Commons licensing into more content creation applications' open challenge.

My specific idea was to build an extension for Microsoft Office. I agree that it's hopelessly derivative of the OpenOffice add-in (http://labs.creativecommons.org/category/openoffice/), but I feel that it doesn't make the project any less useful. I've been copying CC attributions into my papers for years, and an easy way to do that would be useful for many people.

Microsoft has a MSOffice add-in for CC, see https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=d1ddbdc8-627f-415a-9b0a-97362bc9b480&displaylang=en

As far as I know it isn't free software, nor even source available, but I could try to find out if it's of interest apart from GSoC.
 

Also, the other motivation for me is that this would (very frankly) be my first time contributing to an open-source project and the fact that someone else has completed a similar project in the 3-month timeframe is enormously encouraging. I'm a reasonably good programmer (I get straight A's in all my programming courses) but contributing to FOSS is something I have no experience with, so please bear with me and point out any mistakes I'm making. I have written a 1500+ line course project in C# (a client for a delay-tolerant filesharing network) and am reasonably comfortable with VS2010, so I have a bit of a handle on the development process. I'm also comfortable with Python.

That is good thinking, much appreciated.
 

What I'd specifically like some feedback on is the proposal.

Frankly, I doubt we'd accept this proposal, even if it were stellar in every respect: we don't have anyone who could mentor it. None of our engineers are Windows developers, and we're bandwidth-constrained enough this summer that mentoring a project we couldn't even build and test would be a recipe for failure.
 

As compared to the other projects on the GSoC, CC doesn't really have a well-defined format for it, so any kind of input you can give me to make my application stronger will be much appreciated.

That's true, as much of the opportunity involves CC integration with other projects, so is pretty diverse.

My guess is that the success of the Libre/OpenOffice add-in means there is plenty of work to be done to take it to the next level. If you're particularly interested in productivity software integration, that's where I'd advise looking.

Mike

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https://creativecommons.net/ml