Making it Meta with XMP
On Adobe's developer center, you'll find a little offering called XMP, The Adobe eXtensible Metadata Platform. This technology allows you to embed data about a file into the file itself.
However, the more interesting thing herein is that the SDK is open, downloadable and available for your use. In fact, XMP is used by a large number of industry standards for their own framework. One worth pointing out to the open source community is the Creative Commons organization. While not required, CC offers an XMP template for marking documents with license information.
But is it open?
Well, let's take a look at the download. Clicking on the download link leads us to the licensing agreement. It's BSD, about as open and friendly as possible.
While the earlier versions were quite open (under an Adobe open source license), the world really doesn't need YAOSL (yet another open source license). Moving to a BSD license allows you to use XMP as you desire, maybe in ways we haven't even thought of.
Anyway, if you haven't taken a look at XMP, nows a great time to start.
as always...