Liblicense

What is liblicense?

In short: Low-level license metadata integration for applications.

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).