Licenses in Operating Systems Specification

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Revision as of 00:40, 2 May 2006 by Jon Phillips (talk | contribs) (fleshing it out)
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Licenses

All licenses should be allowed into this structure. T

Questions

  • What licenses should be allowed?
  • Should licenses be weighted?
  • How will they connect with mime-types and how will a system know which filetypes connect with which licenses?

Naming

What is the best way to name licenses for inclusion.

Possibly this form:

LICENSE_PROVIDER-LICENSENAME-FORM-VERSION.OPTIONAL_FILE_ENDING

Then, for the three file types, this possibly would make sense:

cc-attribution-machine-2.5.rdf
cc-attribution-human-2.5.txt
cc-attribution-lawyer-2.5.txt

This way also, a system could have other versions of licenses, such as:

cc-attribution-machine-2.5.rdf
cc-attribution-machine-2.5.xml

cc-attribution-human-2.5.txt
cc-attribution-human-2.5.html
cc-attribution-human-2.5.odt

cc-attribution-lawyer-2.5.txt
cc-attribution-lawyer-2.5.html
cc-attribution-lawyer-2.5.rtf

Forms

Human-Readable

This would be the human readable commons deed that is included with a license.

Lawyer-Readable

This would be the legalese for lawyers and courts to read that is specific and really the highest level (most abstract) version of a license.

Machine-Readable

This is the digital version of a license that is to be read by software (machines).

Operating Systems

Linux

Path =

System-level

/usr/share/licenses

User-level

~/.licenses/

Please help us fill this out :)

Mac OS X

Path

System-level

/Library/Application\ Support/Licenses

User-level

~/Library/Application\ Support/Licenses

Windows

Path

System=level

C:\%COMMONFILES%\create

User-level

C:\%APPDATA%\create (for local use)

Filetype Mapping

There should be a simple mechanism for mapping known filetypes to types of licenses that can be used with a type of content. There should also be some mechanism for recognizing preferences and possible violations of licenses.

Questions

  • How does this fit in with mimetypes?
  • How can these preferences be dealt with?
  • Is dealing with possible violation too DRM-like?

Preferences

This is a section TBD on how to deal with preferred licenses and also licenses whose filetype/mime-type mapping is not known.

Offline vs. Online

There needs to be away to use web services (like CC Web Services) to get the most up-to-date versions of licenses and as a fallback, use the on-disk versions of licenses. Also, some people and systems might not have web access, so there is a definite need for a place for these files to exist in an operating system. Also, most software just includes a license for source code and they forget that the GNU GPL is not for content. Thus, having a local link to licenses would promote licensing individual content distributed in an operating system through a distro to license-up and be legal.

TODO

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