Liblicense 0.3

Liblicense is a library for managing license metadata, in particular CC licensing information.
The idea of this library started out on the IRC channel, in a discussion on how to best help boost the community of software developers working with things related to CC - mostly the metadata format.
Basically, the idea is to write a portable C library that manages metadata for CC licenses, and a bunch of other licenses of interest to the community.
The library will produce licensing information based on the specifications of calling libraries and programs. In addition to generating text for specific licenses, it will also allow an application to enumerate which licenses are currently available and provide descriptive text for each license, and for license features. It should also provide an easy way to specify "verify at" URLs.
The benefit of this library is that applications linking to it can correctly offer licensing choices, and these choices can be transparently updated through package managers as license versions are updated. Human readable descriptions will also be internationalized, preferably using the same .po files used by the CC web site. Hence liblicense will take advantage of package updating and i18n systems to allow applications to always provide c current and correct licensing choices and license text.
Part of the project is also to provide wrappers for the library for other languages, and to help external developers add metadata support to their projects. A good start will probably be to wrap the library for Python, and use it for ccpublisher.
We will also integrate a module system so that libraries can be used to embed and extract metadata in/from common formats.
As liblicense itself deals only with text strings, we can also make GUI libraries to provide dialogs which present these strings to the user in desktop or web applications. This layering ensures that such dialogs present consistent licensing choices.
Enhancements:
- This is the first version to feature desktop integration.
- It now features Gnome Nautilus integration: licenses are displayed and can be written from within Nautilus.
- The integration also takes advantage of emblems to visibly display files as licensed.
- Additionally, it features new modules supporting reading from and writing licenses to MSOffice (pre-2007), FLAC, Ogg+FLAC, MusePack, and SMIL.