[Sugar-devel] [Feature] CC_selection_in_Journal

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Walter,

On 1 Dec 2009, at 23:19, Walter Bender wrote:

> A discussion about licensing in today's marketing meeting brought to
> mind a feature that managed to miss Feature Freeze back in 2007 and
> subsequently was abandoned. Please check out
> [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Feature_CC_selection_in_Journal#UI_Design]
> and comment.
> 
> Summary: While we encourage learners to create and share their work,
> we provide no mechanism for them to assign licenses to their work.
> This feature introduces a license field to the Journal to give the
> learner an opportunity to assign a Cc license to their work.

It makes the Journal visually more complicated and eats space by quite a large step. Even with the original cartoon tutorial activity, the concept is at the upper end (at best) for our target age range. Perhaps if the feature was a level down in the Journal UI, on the details page? We would also have to be very careful about carrying that metadata reliably with the work data; over journal sharing, activity collaboration, USB transfers, Moodle server uploads, backups... at least within the Sugar ecosystem. It might be possible to automatically add and read this metadata information directly to some of the common data formats (jpg, png, odf, pdf), but that still leaves many that couldn't hold it.

I guess it's a good visual icon for what other document systems would display as a simple copyright text input field for the author to complete. A fall back could be to use the CC cartoon activity to teach kids about the concept, and then use the description field or add the license text directly in the actual work.

Regards,
--Gary