Applied Licensing »
Yesterday I talked about licensing theory, and why I was moving to the Open Software License 2.0. Today I'm going to talk about how I took on that project.
But first - I've updated SomeDays to version 1.4.0.
The program has now been released under the Open Software License. I hadn't really specified an explicit license previously, so I'm not exactly sure how all that works. I don't know that anyone has actually used the program other than myself, so it may not matter. Get the update here.
Anyway, I've also updated my pages (including CSS), and feeds where possible, to reflect this new licensing strategy. All traces that I could find of Creative Commons are pretty much gone. I say pretty much, because in the feeds, I continue to make use of the CC extensions to both versions of my feeds that support extensions. I just don't point to a CC license.
How did I do all that? Well, it was a bit of a pain. Mostly because I had all this CC-specific code everywhere, as that's what comes built-in to Movable Type. So the first thing I did was take a look to see how tightly woven CC is in the fabric of the MT system. The answer? Pretty tight. I could make it work reasonably well, but it would just take too much effort. So I created a new plugin. This one is called SomeTags, and was just released as version 1.0.
Currently, SomeTags allows you to make use of three extra tags. These tags are not restricted to a particular context, and in fact will work no differently if they are used within a context than if they are used without. With no further ado:
<$MTSTLicenseTitle$> - returns the title of your license
<$MTSTLicenseURL$> - returns the URL to the details of your license
<$MTSTLicenseVersion$> - returns the version number of your license
The only downside to the use of this plugin is that you need to set each of those values within the plugin itself. Documentation on doing so, and on installation in general, is included within the archive. If you can think of any additional tags that might prove useful, please let me know.
I'm also working on an updated block of metadata to replace the CC one - but I'm not quite certain that I've got it correct just yet. When I do, I'll let you know - and perhaps add it to SomeTags if it seems to make sense to do so.
