Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Matt Lee <mattl AT creativecommons.org>]

Thanks to Maarten and to Bjorn for your feedback.

Just a follow up on some things I've been working on in response to this 
thread.

* Firstly, I am working on bringing back the labs blog. Later today
it'll be up with a new look and a Jekyll site, that'll be public. I'm
going to be updating it three times a week with news and giving more
transparency for some of the work I'm doing, and others are doing.

* As you may know, we already have a non-CC developer working on The
List app, and we expect to get many more. In the last few months, I
have been traveling around, talking about The List, and we are
currently working toward an alpha release in the coming weeks.

If you're interested in hacking on The List, we have an Android app in
development, which is mostly Java, and a web app which is mostly PHP.
We also have an early version of our website about The List, which I'm
going to hope we can launch in the next few days, but it's all up
there in GitHub, if you're interested.

https://github.com/creativecommons/list

Regarding the contributor agreement:

As we're already dealing with outside contributions on this app, and
given my limited resources at CC, I don't want to worry about being
unable to release the app, or worse, being unable to release the app
under a free license.

I signed a very similar document with the Free Software Foundation
about 8 years ago and it has been extremely easy to contribute to a
lot of free software since then. In fact, it has been my job for most
of that time.

As a small team with few resources, we need to be able to keep all our
work public and freely licensed, and this is a legal hack to do just
that.

Projects that don't have such an agreement in place are effectively
stuck on a particular license for the rest of time. That's a situation
I'd like to avoid.