rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

While I’m building-up my mental engines in Cao Chang Di (Cultural Industries) in Beijing, I received an invitation to speak at Gnome’s first Asia conference, aptly titled, Gnome.Asia in Beijing. I’m going to take a crack and speak about something I haven’t been directly been involved in hacking, promoting or developing, but have been using massively which is what I’m just calling Autonomo.us Open Software Services, particularly micro-blogging on Identi.ca. I want to zoom out a bit from Creative Commons licensing, Open Source hacking and postulate where computing culture is heading, and how FLOSS developers can surge ahead by looking beyond Gnome 3.0, Gnome Online Desktop, etc. The presentation is called “The Autonomo.us Open Software Services Evolution, featuring Identi.ca” and I start the statement with:

Who provides your e-mail service? Where do you post your photos? Do you download music still? When all of our data is spread amongst multiple devices between multiple locations – home, office, and mobile – then it becomes clear why on-line network services rule supreme over managing personal computers in providing synchronized capable services that don’t require us to update software or hack-in fixes. The modern person’s primary concern in using a computer is to get things done and stay connected with others globally in the most effective ways possible.

And continues…

This presentation looks at the landscape of services like Identi.ca which are adapting the Free and Open Source Software approach to on-line network services publicly championed from the Autonomo.us blog. This is timely because the personal computing shift from the desktop to the web is a hot topic with the Gnome Online Desktop and Gnome 3.0 initiatives. However, with long development cycles, arduous community learning curves and reliance upon cranky software languages, the simple accessible nature of web application development is thriving. This presentation instigates increased development on web services that protect user autonomy by commonly using the GNU Affero GPL 3.0 software license, creating free services to replace popular non-free alternatives, and by replacing centralized services with open distributed ones when possible. This presentation emphasizes the role of the Gnome Desktop to be a lean mean on-line desktop machine and what role Chinese businesses can play in accelerating this next dynamic wave of the FLOSS movement.

The complete description and location details are at the Gnome.Asia site. My presentation is at 3 PM next Saturday, October 18 in Beijing. I posted it up on my wiki with some basic research to get the talk together. If there is anything missing, or research I should jump into please do add to it.

Right now there are very few services committed to the Franklin Street Declaration and I want to use some brain power to investigate what services might be easily converted, services that should be created, with rankings for priority and level of difficulty for replacement. Identi.ca is mind blowing example of openness at its best. So, how can I help push this plan forward more?

I’m thinking a lot right now about my moves in both contemporary culture, art and technology. And, I want to most definitely keep pushing on the FLOSS side of things, but keep in mind the larger picture, cultural priorities, as well as personal priorities Yes, we all have those!

Asheesh blogged about the super-cool liblicense 0.5: first stable version of C library supporting CC metadata - Creative Commons. The thing I would add for all you out there in licensing land is that this generalized to support all free and open content licensing as long as it uses the great RDF developed by CC to express a license:

With the help of Hubert Figuiere, Nathan Yergler, Peter Miller, Scott Shawcroft, and Jason Kivlighn, I’m happy to finally announce a new version of liblicense. Summary: Now this is really worth using.

For those just joining us now, liblicense is a library to make it easy to add CC metadata support to desktop and server side software you write. The biggest reason to choose liblicense rather than handling CC metadata yourself is that we (huge thanks to Jason and Hubert) have written handlers for many file formats. We use Hubert’s Exempi library that is derived from Adobe’s Free/Open Source XMP library.

The two major driving factors on this release were making it crash less and providing a stable interface (API and ABI) for others to build upon. Earlier versions of liblicense would crash on invalid files. Also, crucially, this release has metadata inside the library, called “shared object versioning,” indicating what features the library supports.

As always, you can reuse this under the terms of the GNU LGPL. It’s interoperable with our metadata panel for Adobe applications, supports embedding into files ranging from JPEG to MP3 to Ogg Vorbis, and is available from SourceForge.net. It is written in C and comes with bindings for Python and Ruby. Finally, thanks to Venkatesh Srinivas for his tireless help.

I haven’t had as much time to blog about this project. I’m super proud of the work done by Scott, Jason, Asheesh, Nathan Y., Hubert, Peter Miller and many others! Thanks guys.

Now, onto the big business! Let’s get this library added to KDE 4.1, the Gnome desktop, and some other example apps like Eye of Gnome (EOG), Rhythmbox, Inkscape, etc. Is anyone interested in this? We need to get it plugged-in. Currently, KDE folks are planning on including in KDE 4.1, so I’d like to talk more with other about getting it into Gnome apps, and more specific apps to drive usage and development of this app. Also, we want to get liblicense integrated into OpenMoko, as liblicense creation happened in order to enable content license read/write on al our devices…ebooks, mp3s, etc, that have their licenses inside.

BTW, liblicense comes with an awesome command-line program called license. All it does is allow for getting and setting of license information on files on your desktop!!! It handles content right now, but there is no reason it can’t handle other things…like source code, etc…just need developers!!!

Oh, in all the hustle and bustle of conference travel, I forgot to promote one of the great projects pushing on at CC right now. Scott Shawcroft and Jason Kivlighn are the main guys working on this for CC. Scott wrote this:

Hi, I’m Scott Shawcroft a Creative Commons technical intern and a student at the University of Washington. I’d like to tell you about my project but will start with a bit of a preface. Sorry its long, I’m excited. I’ve been a fan of Creative Commons for a few years now. I watched the original Get Creative video in awe. A few months earlier I discovered GNU/Linux. Having a free (in both senses in my mind) operating system at my disposal felt immensely empowering. The collaboration of people around the world enabled by the Internet. Wow. I was introduced to a new world by broadband internet. (CD isos are huge in dial-up times.) To top my discovery of free software I discovered Free Culture. People collaborating across borders in hopes of expressing ideas in an endless variety of ways. Audio, video, photography, poetry and scientific research all released with ’some rights reserved’. Again, wow. The web was blossoming with license data, the GNU GPL and others on Sourceforge and Creative Commons licenses on Flickr. The web was going somewhere. The desktop was going… nowhere.

While the web had a way of denoting and acknowledging an author’s intention, the desktop had no such thing. No easy way to say, “This file is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.” There was no easy way to ask, “How can I use this file? What does the creator allow me to do?” Once off of the web, the files were on their own. Away from all of the comforts of the creator’s website in the big mess of files we call a desktop computer. When would this all change? When will a license be as ubiquitous as a last modified date?

Both the original Get Creative video and in the newer Wanna Work Together video emphasize the fact that upon the fixation of an idea in a tangible form its author gains a bundle of exclusive rights formally known as copyright. Each and every file on each and every computer created by someone has rights associated with it. Upon creation of those files, the user has a copyright for each one. To counter this automatic copyright, a desktop-centric fundamental way to release those given rights is needed.

I’m happy to announce that this is about to change. With great thanks to Jason Kivlighn, Jon Phillips, Nathan Yergler and every license author I’d like to point you to liblicense, the first small and shaky step towards universal license tracking on the desktop. What we’ve created is a library to assist in tracking and tagging file’s licenses. Our intention is not to create the means for rights restriction but to ease the process of informing users about the rights granted by the author of a particular file. We’re not in the restriction business. We’re in the information business.

However, this is a very small step and there are many more steps to go. Liblicense is in need of much love. Kind of like the teenage years; it still has some things to get sorted out before it matures. Also, its a bit lonely. There are many cool companions to it which have yet to be written. As I wrote earlier, we’re planning on venturing into the world of Sugar for the One Laptop Per Child project. That still leaves much unexplored. What about applications? Sure, the desktop will know about licenses. But what about music players, feed readers, desktop publishers and text editors? All of those applications are in the business of ideas. Shouldn’t they display the rights to the information they are dealing with? Imagine finding a song you love using Amarok and finding out you can share it with your friends. Or imagine finding a brilliant poem on a blog through Liferea you can base a video or song off of. Cool. I’m excited.

One last thing, liblicense is, well, kind of skinny. To continue the teenage analogy you are probably sick of, liblicense is the skinny kid who could use some bulking up. While Jason (my esteemed colleague, former roommate and great friend) and I are trying our best to get liblicense to bulk up, we could use your help. We’d like liblicense to support embedding license information into all of the file types known to man. I’m serious. All applications and even the kernel of the operating system should have license information embedded in them. While some formats have semi-standard ( and I say semi due to the lack of application of said standard ) methods for embedding license, others just plain don’t. Those issues need to get resolved before we can support every file format known to man. I know what you are thinking, “It can’t be done. He’s intentionally exaggerating.” Well, you are wrong. Again, I’m serious. Every file format can be supported, its just an issue of how. And an issue of how can be solved. We just need your help. The power of collaboration knows no bounds.

For more information about liblicense visit the project page at http://www.creativecommons.org/project/Liblicense. If you are running Linux (other platforms planned) and would like to try it get it here. If you would like to help develop liblicense or talk with/get help from the developers join us on irc.freenode.net/#cc or the mailing list cc-devel@lists.ibiblio.org. Thanks.