Include licenses in operating systems

Please Participate! This article has been marked as incomplete. Please help us by expanding it.

In order to find licenses, a system needs an online and offline approach. The offline approach should be to include all expressions of a license into one's operating system of choice and then use web services where applicable (like the CC Web Services) to get the latest licenses from within applications. Ideally, the mechanism for accessing licenses should be abstracted from any one license provider. However, one should remember that using the most major licenses for content is good to not overload users with too many options (thus turning them away).'

Inside of this licenses folder should really be provided a human readable form of a license, a legal version and a machine-readable version for our uses here.

Another feature that would be very useful is specific license and mime-type mapping of which licenses support which type of content. This should be overridable as well, and one should be able to setup their own license affiliations and preferences for different file types. If a file type/mime-type is unknown, the system should really ask a user what to do. First order would be to tell a user to upgrade to the latest licenses and then second would be to ask them for preference.

This task is actually quite big, so here are some nice waypoint challenges:

Implement this spec. on a specific system
Provide an installation system for this that is cross-platform
- This is because it is likely that the Open Source world will see the need for this, but will be difficult to get into Mac OS X and Windows.
- Installers will make it easier to get into non-open operating systems
Get this spec. into your favorite distribution
Get desktop applications using this spec. for enhancing finding and publishing