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.

Er, maybe not. Fourty-five minutes, five marker colors and multiple digressions later, I had the following diagram of life as it is today.

Life sucks.

Asheesh joined us and we started talking about how we can make this better. The above, while eminently sucky, has grown up during my time at Creative Commons. All those decisions made sense at the time, but in aggregate we’ve got lots of duplicated code, a branch of code named the gradually-increasing-sanity-branch which doesn’t (I take the blame for that one), and plenty of unnecessary complexity. Half an hour later, we had mapped out The Glorious Future®:

A little simpler, huh? And the “future” diagram shows all the functionality of the present, plus three packages not displayed on the original diagram. Our immediate goal in moving in this direction is the completion of cc.license (labeled as “cc.licenze” in the diagrams to distinguish it from the existing implementation) which will replace the existing XSLT processing using for issuing licenses and wraps the RDF (which is the canonical representation of the licenses anyway). We’ll also manage to dramatically reduce the number of svn:externals we use, which is good since we’re moving away from Subversion for some projects. My goal is to get this upgrade done as soon as possible so we can focus on things that are actually interesting instead of our own infrastructure.