liblicense

Description of Software	Low-level license metadata integration for applications.
Bug Tracker	Link to Bug Tracker
Code Repository	http://code.creativecommons.org/viewgit/liblicense.git/
Mailing List	http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-devel

What is liblicense?

liblicense provides a straight-forward way for developers to build license-aware applications. liblicense utilizes a pluggable module system for reading and writing metadata from specific file types, allowing extensibility for specific content types.

• For a brief introduction video, check Asheesh Laroia talking about liblicense
• To see liblicense in action take a look at License tagger, the cross platform file metadata editor.

Features

• Extract and write license information for files
• Supports enumeration of available licenses
• Wraps internationalized license information for Creative Commons licenses
• Bindings for dynamic languages (currently Python and Ruby)
• Extensible support for file types using module system
• No specific GUI library dependency allows applications to build the graphical chooser most appropriate for their platform.

Future Improvements

• Supports verification URLs for metadata verification

Architecture

Liblicense Architecture - SVG

Bindings

• Python
• Ruby

Media

See Operating System Mockups for ideas on how liblicense could be integrated into various platforms.

Download

• Latest Release tar.gz
• Debian and Ubuntu repositories.
• Read the tutorial.

Developers: Using git

If you want to check out the source code and develop on it, use this command:

git clone git://code.creativecommons.org/liblicense.git
git submodule init
git submodule update

That should give you a working copy you can commit to. In case you wonder: the latter two commandsfill the directories

• icons/jurisdictions
• license.rdf
• licenses

with content from external repositories similar to svn:externals for Subversion.

More Information

• Release History and Roadmap
• Desktop Integration
• Screenshots
• RDF Reference
• File Metadata Information
• Library Documentation (generated from source)
• Buildbot helps test out liblicense on various platforms.

See Also

• Companion File metadata specification
• Tracker CC Indexing - also there is a great chart showing progress on reading/writing different filetypes (copied above).

Liblicense
Have an idea about this page? Want to help build the CC ecosystem? Check out the challenges related to Liblicense, or add one of your own below.
Open Challenges
CC Publisher Refresh and Update
Completed Challenges
GUI for embedding license claims in files and generating claim verification RDF