Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization which provides free open content licenses to the world.
Creative Commons licensing will be integrated throughout the OLPC project:
- Contributions to the OLPC project wiki are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5
- Creative Commons licensing functionality for the XO laptops is currently under development:
- Liblicense, a new software library developed by Creative Commons, allows users of the laptops to attach Creative Commons licenses to the media produced on the XO.
- Sugar Licensing Activity, an interactive licensing module (currently in beta) that allows laptop users to decide upon a license for the content they create.
- Sharing Creative Works, comic book style documentation designed to educate children and parents about Creative Commons' licensing options
- Creative Commons and OLPC will continue to work together on open content as part of CC’s LiveContent initiative
The OLPC XO laptop encourages children to freely reuse, remix, and create content. By default, children's creations will not contain a specified license. However, CC-licensing will give children--along with a parent--the freedom to decide the correct license for the content they create. Creative Commons licensing clearly signals how content may be used by others.
License for the OLPC Wiki
The text of this wiki is published under a Creative Commons Attribution license:
Images, media, and uploaded files are each available under their own license; all compatible with our goals for sharing and reuse. See OLPC:License for details.
Projects
liblicense-sugar Integration
Creative Commons developed liblicense as a general c-based library for adding license support to OLPC, OpenMoko, Gnome, KDE, and other desktops. We also have built some integration code and have submitted this patch and the latest RPM of liblicense to https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3529 for adding liblicense to OLPC and also to the Journal to set both a default content license and also to set a per-journal-entry CC license.
Tracked Enhancements
- <trac>3529 Adding liblicense support to OLPC Sugar Journal</trac>
- <trac>3531 Add license search to the journal</trac>
Tracked Bugs
- None yet! Cool!
liblicense-sugar Customizations
Here is where customization of liblicense and OLPC integration will be discussed, and eventually possibly moved to its own page. liblicense-sugar is extensible. There will be a need in the future for possible customizations per jurisdiction, so what to keep that in mind and document as the need arises.
Licensing Activity
An interactive licensing module that allows laptop users to decide upon a license for the content they create. Using iconic, comic book style documentation, the activity is designed to educate children and parents about Creative Commons' licensing options. After viewing the comics, there is an option of selecting a default license for the creative works one creates on the XO. The license chooser is clear and easy-to-use, allowing the license permissions to be explored by all users of an XO.
License Setting in Control Panel
Initially OLPC was not going to have a control panel, but there is the possibility this will be needed in future versions of the device, so liblicense-sugar will possibly need to be integrated into this.
Licensing Curriculum
This is much more down the road, but hopefully an outcome from the Licensing Activity is to develop some curriculum. This is a lower priority than integration.