I spent last Friday through Monday in Boston for the Gnome Boston Hacker Summit, held at MIT’s Stata Center. A free form gathering of hackers and Gnome enthusiasts, I was there to see how Creative Commons licensing and licensed content can work together with one of the leading Free Software desktop environments. The three days of the conference were spent talking to developers, participating in BOFs (Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, where people with similar interests gather) and asking lots of questions like “How do you see CC working with your application?” and “What sort of integration are you interested in?” I came away with several ideas and several promising starting points.

First, we at CC are going to start doing what I’ve been promising for months: packaging our applications for Linux. I don’t have a firm time table, but it’s most likely that ccPublisher 2, due later this year, will be the first out with Linux packages. Second, expect to see Gnome desktop apps adding the ability to expose CC metadata, and in some cases add it at the time of creation. Finally, we’re going to be working on providing developers with the tools and information necessary to make integration a snap.

If you’re a developer and are interested in adding CC to your app, let me know. Or check out the Developer section of our wiki. We’ll be adding more resources there are they become available.