Flickr on Thursday released a new version of its tool for uploading photos to the Yahoo photo-sharing site, and made it an open-source program in the process.
Flickr Uploadr 3.0, available for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 and for Windows XP and Vista is now available in source code form, too, governed by version 2 of the General Public License (GPL). Open-source software may be freely modified, copied, and shared; opening source code could let programmers modify the Uploadr tool so it works on Linux or uploads to other photo-sharing sites, for example.
Uploadr lets photographers select photos for upload, add tags, organize them into sets, and change privacy settings. Among the changes in Version 3 is the ability to set the photo order in sets and to add new photos to the upload queue while others are in the process of being transferred.
Uploadr 3.0 also inherits Flickr's multilanguage support: English, French, traditional Chinese, Korean, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.
Flickr also released a new statistics tool Thursday for pro users (pro accounts cost $25 per year but are free for those who get DSL through Yahoo-branded deals). Flickr Stats shows whence visitors came to look at your photos, either from within Flickr or outside on the Web.
Stats also shows totals for recent viewings of photos and compiles data such as how many photos have tags, geotags, and comments. Views of your photos can be sorted by viewing totals, comments, favorite status, and the ever-elusive "interestingness" ranking.
The Affero General Public License, a new variation of the seminal General Public License (GPL) specifically for one situation the regular GPL doesn't address, is now final.
The Affero GPL contains a provision specifically for situations when software it governs is accessible as a service over a network. Where the GPL treats that situation as a private use of software, permitting the user to keep any changes private, the Affero GPL lets programmers include a requirement that users of the software must be able to download it when it's offered as a network service.
The Free Software Foundation, the organization founded by Richard Stallman in the 1980s to bypass the proprietary constraints of the traditional software world, published the new software license Monday after releasing draft versions earlier this year.
The Affero GPL license is increasingly relevant as companies such as Google employ customized open-source software to run massive online businesses with no requirement for sharing. However, intellectual property attorney Eben Moglen, who helped craft GPLv3, said other pressure can be brought to bear if companies take advantage of GPL software without reciprocating.
"If you want to protect your business model, you must be model citizens of the environment. If you shrink, political pressure will grow to constrain your rights to secure the rights of everyone else," Moglen said in May. "Upon the behavior of Google much depends."
The FSF had contemplated adding that feature of the Affero GPL to the new version 3 of the GPL, but chose instead to release the separate license. Adding yet another license to the profusion already available to free and open-source programmers complicates licensing choices somewhat, but the FSF said that code written under the GPL and Affero GPL may be combined in some circumstances
The FSF's Affero announcement is here, and a set of frequently asked questions on the GPL is here.
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