liblicense 0.8.1: The bugfixiest release ever

asheesh, December 25th, 2008

I’m greatly pleased to announce liblicense 0.8.1. Steren and Greg found a number of major issues (Greg found a consistent crasher on amd64, and Steren found a consistent crasher in the Python bindings). These issues, among
some others, are fixed by the wondrous liblicense 0.8.1. I mentioned to Nathan Y. that liblicense is officially “no longer ghetto.”

The best way enjoy liblicense is from our Ubuntu and Debian package repository, at http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/packages/. More information on what liblicense does is available on our wiki page about liblicense. You can also get them in fresh Fedora 11 packages. And the source tarball is available for download from sourceforge.net.

P.S. MERRY CHRISTMAS!

The full ChangeLog snippet goes like this:

liblicense 0.8.1 (2008-12-24):
* Cleanups in the test suite: test_predicate_rw’s path joiner finally works
* Tarball now includes data_empty.png
* Dynamic tests and static tests treat $HOME the same way
* Fix a major issue with requesting localized informational strings, namely that the first match would be returned rather than all matches (e.g., only the first license of a number of matching licenses). This fixes the Python bindings, which use localized strings.
* Add a cooked PDF example that actually works with exempi; explain why that is not a general solution (not all PDFs have XMP packets, and the XMP packet cannot be resized by libexempi)
* Add a test for writing license information to the XMP in a PNG
* Fix a typo in exempi.c
* Add basic support for storing LL_CREATOR in exempi.c
* In the case that the system locale is unset (therefore, is of value “C”), assume English
* Fix a bug with the TagLib module: some lists were not NULL-terminated
* Use calloc() instead of malloc()+memset() in read_license.c; this improves efficiency and closes a crasher on amd64
* Improve chooser_test.c so that it is not strict as to the *order* the results come back so long as they are the right licenses.
* To help diagnose possible xdg_mime errors, if we detect the hopeless application/octet-stream MIME type, fprintf a warning to stderr.
* Test that searching for unknown file types returns a NULL result rather than a segfault.

Flickr Image Re-Use for OpenOffice.org new updates

Mihai Husleag, August 12th, 2008

Since my last article new functionalities were implemented :

- more results per page (16 to be more exactly)

- an image is inserted if you double click on it(previous was on a single click)

- i add it the functionality for Impress and Calc

- fixed some bugs related to search

Unfortunately i have a problem with the popup menu on right click menu. It seems if that if set the location of the popup on the place where the right click happens, the popup indeed will appear but only for a moment. This happens not for all those 16 results, but for lets say more than half.

Now i found some settings and at this moment the popup will appear for each result, unfortunately the location where the popup appears is not exactly on the result (slightly above). I have to work more on this.

Some screenshots :

Results

Writer

Impress

Calc

Download extension (right click and save as)

Flickr Image Re-Use for OpenOffice.org Demo availlable

Mihai Husleag, July 12th, 2008

Never trust a programmer when he gives you a date for something to be done . Thats what i did in my last article (2 weeks i think i said then) and here we are a month later.

What has be done since my last article :

• right click on an result (image) will show you a popup menu with the available sizes on Flickr server
• left click on a result will insert directly in Writer the image with size medium as default
• once the image is inserted some text will be added beside the image(title , link to the image, license and link to the license)
• i improved searching and the way the image is adding into Writer
• i added a more friendly interface when you want to search over license (similar with advanced search on Flickr website)
• added a previous button to see previous results if needed
• if you insert a image, when you open again the extension the previous search will be done immediately ( on the exact the same position if you used the previous or next buttons)
• about searching : we can have multiple tags (separated by space : ” “) and the relation between them is AND . also the results are ordered by interestingness
• a progress bar was added
• the extension after installation can be found here : Insert \ Picture \ From Flickr …

Some screenshots :

The results from a search by the extension vs Flickr search

Right click on an image

Inserted image into Writer

Also i would to add that this extension, at this momment, works only in Writer.

Download (right click and save as)

Any suggestions or remarks are greatly appreciated.

License-oriented metadata validator and viewer: libvalidator

Hugo Dworak, July 8th, 2008

As the Google Summer of Code 2008 midterm evaluation deadline is approaching, it is a good time to report the progress when it comes to the license-oriented metadata validator and viewer.

The source code is located in two dedicated git repositories. The first being validator, which contains the source code of the Web application based on Pylons and Genshi. The second repository is libvalidator, which hosts the files that constitute the core library that the project will utilise. This is the component that the development focuses on right now.

The purpose of the aforementioned library is to parse input files, scan them for relevant license information, and output the results in a machine-readable fashion. More precisely, its workflow is the following: parse the file and associated RDF information so that a complete set of RDF data is available, filter the results with regard to license information (not only related to the document itself, but also to other objects described within it), and return the results in a manner preferable for the usage by the Web application.

pyRdfa seems to be the best tool for the parsing stage so far. It handles the current recommendation for embedding license metadata (namely RDFa) as well as other non-deprecated methods: linking to an external or embedded (using the “data” URL scheme) RDF files and utilising the Dublin Core. The significant lacking is handling of the invalid direct embedding of RDF/XML within the HTML/XHTML source code (as an element or in a comment) and this is resolved by first capturing all such instances using a regular expression and then parsing the data just as external RDF/XML files.

Once the RDF triples are extracted, one can use SPARQL to narrow the results just to the triples related to the licensed objects. Both librdf and rdflib support this language. Moreover, the RDF/XML related to the license must be parsed, so that its conditions (permissions, requirements, and restrictions) are then presented to the user.

The library takes advantage of standard Python tools such as Buildout and nose. When it is completed, the project will be all about writing a Web application that will serve as an interface to libvalidator.

Flickr Image Re-Use for OpenOffice.org update

Mihai Husleag, June 13th, 2008

I`m happy to announce that i succeeded in doing, in a basic manner, all the 3 requirements for this project : search photos by tags, by license and to insert one photo into a document.

Here you have a screenshot made after a search was done on tag mountains and license Attribution License :

Also here you have the screenshot with the photo inserted into a document . As you can see the image was inserted with a default size, but this will be changed later.

What i`ll try to do next :

• add menus to each image with the available sizes
• improve the searching
• inserting the image into the document with the selected size
• adding the license into the document
• more testing

I hope, that in less than 2 weeks i will make available a good version.

Any comments or suggestions are well appreciated.

ps : I came across this article. “I for one can’t wait.” says Andrew Min about this project. I`ll try to not disappoint him :)

GSoC 2008 : Flickr Image Re-Use for OpenOffice.org

Mihai Husleag, May 29th, 2008

As title might suggest, i have been selected for GSoC 2008. As mentor for this project has been assigned Nathan Yergler.

The developing will focus on 3 key functionalities:

• ability to search photos by tags
• filter search results by license attributes
• insert the image into the document along with attribution information

The first 2 steps were done(of course, this will not be the final version) in small demo that i attached to my application for GSoC 2008. The OpenOffice components for which the extension will be implemented are Writer, Impress and Calc.

The application will be written in Java, using NetBeans with its plugin OpenOffice NetBeans Integration.

A short introduction : I`m Mihai Husleag, 24 years old, student in Computer Science, at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania. My previous experience as programmer is more related to the .NET framework. Another thing about me, if in the weekends i`m not reachable then its a high probability that you will find me here.

If you have any suggestions about this project(new functionalities, things you don’t like, etc) feel free to leave a comment.

License-oriented metadata validator and viewer: the development has just started

Hugo Dworak, May 26th, 2008

Creative Commons participates in Google Summer of Code™ and has accepted a proposal (see the abstract) of Hugo Dworak based on its description of a task to rewrite its now-defunct metadata validator. Asheesh Laroia has been assigned as the mentor of the project. The work began on May 26th, 2008 as per the project timeline. It is expected to be completed in twelve weeks. More details will be provided in the dedicated CC Wiki article and the progress will be weekly featured on this blog.

The project focuses on developing an on-line tool — free software written in Python — to validate digitally embedded Creative Commons licenses within files of different types. Files will be pasted directly to a form, identified by a URL, or uploaded by a user. The application will present the results in a human?readable fashion and notify the user if the means used to express the license terms are deprecated.

A patchy web server

asheesh, August 13th, 2007

The tech team here is examining how we can better-organize our web servers and web sites. If you are a DNS sleuth, you may have noticed that most of our web sites are served from a server called “apps.creativecommons.org.” But there are some problems with this setup: for example, some of our sites are lots of little static files (like the images site, i.creativecommons.org), and some serve CPU-intensive web pages (like wiki.creativecommons.org). We can handle many, many more requests to i.creativecommons.org per second than to wiki.creativecommons.org.

In order to prevent Apache from overloading the computer it’s running on, we have to limit the maximum number of web pages it can serve at once. If a thousand people at once were requesting our images, that would be no problem, but we couldn’t really handle a thousand requests to our wiki at once. So we have to set the web server to the limit that can be handled by the most difficult site – otherwise, when more people start editing our wiki at once than we can handle, service will degrade really terribly for everyone, even the clients just getting images from i.creativecommons.org!

We knew the above from experience, but we didn’t really have data on which web sites (”vhosts”) were using up the most server resources. At first I thought I’d turn to Apache’s powerful logging system. I wanted to know how much server time was elapsing between the start of a request and when the server was ready to respond to it. Alas, mod_log_config only lets you log the total time elapsed from start of request to end of request, which means that large files or users on slow links can distort the picture. A large image file going slowly to a modem user doesn’t actually preclude us from sending another few hundred such files at the same time. On the other hand, if a wiki page is taking 5 seconds before it is ready to be sent to the user, those 5 seconds will be even longer if someone else requests another wiki page. Measuring the time from start of request to the beginning of the response seemed a good (albeit rough) way to measure actual server-side resources needed to respond.

I did notice that mod_headers could send a message to the client telling him exactly what I wanted to record! So I patched Apache to have mod_headers pass its information down to mod_log_config, and then I could log how much time elapsed from request start to

Every once in a while, but as recently as this past weekend (at Super Happy Dev House, even!), I hear people say, “Open source is great, but it’s not as if anyone actually uses the source to fix problems they encounter.” In this case, software freedom was more than theoretical; it meant the ability to make the software tell us things about itself that helps us better serve the community we exist to serve.

You all can see (and distribute under the same terms as Apache) the patch and some quick reporting scripts I slapped together. Feel free to email me with any questions!

Liblicense is alpha!

Scott Shawcroft, June 29th, 2007

Over the last week a lot of progress has been made on liblicense. Yesterday Jason and I got the module_read and module_write functions working with a stub io module and an XMP sidecar module. Tuesday and Wednesday I got the library’s system license functions working. Today I did some memory leak plugging and wrote out the system default functions. Nearly every part of the library works as planned. While its still rough, the bulk of the library work is done.

The most common data structure I’ve been using is a null-terminated list (really an array) of strings (char*). Yesterday I wrote out some common methods to be shared throughout the library. These are in list.c. My hope is that these common functions will allow the other code to be cleaner. Next week I plan on fixing up system_licenses.c to use the list functions. At the moment it is the largest, ugliest and leakiest of all the files. That will all be fixed Monday.

After the code cleanup on Monday the much more exciting task of creating modules and clients of the library begins. We’d like to support embedding in as many file formats as possible. Without this ability, the license tracking only works locally. One of the most useful libraries so far is Exempi which can embed in a number of formats. Jason wrote an Exempi liblicense module yesterday. On my list of clients to do is a Gnome Control Panel system default, Nautilus license select, Sugar license select and Creative Commons default license chooser. Am I missing anything important? Where could licenses be integrate besides this? Perhaps Amarok or an equivalent? ccHost? Let me know what you think.

Exempi 1.99.0 Released

alex, May 30th, 2007

Following on from Jon’s follow-up, Hubert Figuiere has released Exempi 1.99.0, now based on Adobe’s XMP SDK.

His blog post includes a nice snippet of code showing how to apply a CC license to a PDF:


#include <exempi/xmp.h>
...
XmpFilePtr f;
f = xmp_files_open_new("test.pdf", XMP_OPEN_FORUPDATE);
XmpPtr xmp = xmp_files_get_new_xmp(f);
xmp_set_property(xmp, NS_XAP_RIGHTS, "Copyright", "(c) ACME Inc., some rights reserved"
" - This work is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike "
"license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/");
xmp_files_put_xmp(f, xmp);
xmp_free(xmp);
xmp_files_close(f, XMP_CLOSE_SAFEUPDATE);


Excellent news for the community, and for the continuing saga of XMP.