GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 629580
Allow user to license public notes under a CC license
Last modified: 2014-08-31 13:36:48 UTC
For users who want to publicly share notes, Snowy could offer the ability for the user to retain copyright or allow the user to license their notes under a CC license. (Similar to how Flickr allows you to license photos under a number of different CC licenses). This feature request was originally brought up on the GNOME marketing mailing list as it relates to the Franklin Street statement.
Be sure to check out the resources from Creative Commons on how to do this effectively (with examples): http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Web_Integration
What about a new NoteTag format? Something align the lines of system:license:cc-sa-noderiv or something vaguely like that? We could even link to the cc website and use their official artwork. This would allow us the flexibility to add something for other licenses such as the gfdl.
That's a good idea; then we can easily let users set the license in their tomboy client if they want to. The only problem there is that a user could put in arbitrary text for their license name, so we'd want a way to display that even if it wasn't a nice icon-friendly cc string. :-)
In thinking about that, what do you think of not letting users enter their own license name (via snowy)? Instead, make it easy for them to request new licenses added to tomboy online/snowy? I can't think of many applicable licenses other than (c) yourself, public domain, the various cc licenses, and gfdl. If more are necessary, we could very easily add them. Attached to those, we could (perhaps) create a license dict or model for the following metadata: - icon ie: cc-sa-noderiv.png - url for more info: ie: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ - human readable name for alt tags and a11y Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to reliably link for more info or display cool badges. We also would have a mess of random and misnamed licenses that no one would really know. I'm not saying only allow licenses named x, y, and z. I'm only saying allow setting licenses named x, y, and z from within snowy. If someone wants to add some crazy license text in their client and sync it via the api so be it. Just display something generic like Unknown license: foobar This should be pretty easy to code up. Thoughts?
Oh, I agree we should restrict the visible choices. I just meant that if it's implemented using a NoteTag, that a user could conceivably modify their .note file and set the tag to whatever value they wanted.
If they did that, have tomboy open up their default browser to: http://www.linuxformat.com/files/nopony.jpg Could you help me come up with what do it in the case they "customize" their license name? If we figure out that case, I could work on patches for adding in this functionality. No clue what the best way to do this in the UI is, but we can work through the easy stuff like the UI.
Well, if the license matches one fo the licenses we understand, we could show a nice badge. Otherwise, we could show something like "User-specified custom license: " and then the license name they entered. It should be a very rare circumstance but it is nice if we handle it gracefully.
I guess we'd need a Terms of Service for Tomboy Online, too, that forces the user to give us permission to display their notes, regardless of what license is set.
A ToS is a good idea which reinforces the need for Tomboy Online's own privacy policy too as you pointed out
I filed a bug for it here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=629690
One thing I would like to request be a part of this feature is the inclusion of machine-readable metadata (using RDFa) for the license information. I would love for Google/Yahoo to know that my notes in tomboy online are under a specific license. They learn about this via reading RDFa. RDFa isn't limited to CC licenses, either. They are just the most prominent user/promoter. See: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/RDFa and http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/RDFa/primer/ Also, see rdfadict (python package) for, at least, writing test coverage: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/rdfadict
Snowy has not seen any code changes since October 2011: https://git.gnome.org/browse/archive/snowy This project is not under active development anymore and got recently archived in GNOME Git. It is currently unlikely that there will be any further active development. Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping to reflect reality. Please feel free to reopen this bug report in the future if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again. If you are interested in maintainership, inform https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list