Jupyter BOAT

Detail of medieval illustrated manuscript marginalia of four rats holding oars in an open wooden boat resting on some water on top of page ornamentation with an image of the planet Jupiter in the sky.

Collage of "Hubble Spies Spooky Shadow on Jupiter's Giant Eye (color)" by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, licensed via CC BY 2.0 and a detail of marginalia of rats in a boat from Pontifical of Guillaume Durand, page 162, circa 1367 from Ms. 143 in the collection of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, which has no known copyright and considered to be in the public domain.

You may have seen the publication of BOAT, the bulk open attribution tool, that used a spreadsheet to enable you to generate open attribution/licensing statements for any collection of works. I’m now releasing another version of BOAT, that does exactly the same thing, but using a computational notebook instead of a spreadsheet to generate well-formed open attribution/licensing statements from a list of basic information about a collection of works.

Bulk Open Attribution Tool (BOAT) 1.0 (now 1.4)

Detail of medieval illustrated manuscript marginalia of four rats holding oars in an open wooden boat resting on water on top of some page ornamentation.

Detail of marginalia of rats in a boat from Pontifical of Guillaume Durand, page 162, circa 1367 from Ms. 143 in the collection of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, which has no known copyright and considered to be in the public domain.

When you are sharing your own creations openly or looking to credit other open works properly and want to create good licensing or attribution statements, what if you have more than one work that you want to create license or attribution statements for? I offer BOAT as an example spreadsheet that anyone can copy and modify to turn their own list of open works into well-structured license/attribution statements.

Open Licensing Over TV Dinners and Smoothies

Image of a TV dinner in a foil tray with different Creative Commons licenses badges on the different food items. This work, CC TV Dinner by Nate Angell is licensed under CC BY, and is a derivative of tv dinner 1 by adrigu (https://flic.kr/p/6AMLDF) used under CC BY, and various Creative Commons license buttons by Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/about/downloads) used under CC BY.

An offhand, only half-serious comment I made in the Creative Commons open education slack channel in response to a very worthy question from BCCampus’ Amanda Coolidge led to a new (?) metaphor to help explain the different open-licensing implications between collecting and redistributing a group of works with different open licenses versus actually remixing several works to form a new, derivative work: hereafter known as the TV dinner vs the smoothie.

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Open-Source Publisher Packt Reaches 1000th Title

Packt, publisher of many worthy books about technology topics that have helped me know what I’m doing, is about to publish their 1000th book. Many Packt titles, such as Sakai CLE Courseware Management: The Official Guide, books on Drupal, and jQuery have been my guides to the open-source technologies I use every day. To celebrate, … Read more