Adobe Relicenses the XMP Toolkit

Adobe has recently announced the release of a new version of its Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP). The XMP platform, or XMP for short, is a specific type of XML, used in PDF and photo editing applications. XMP records metadata in a syntax that forms a subset of the WWW Consortium Resource Description Framework, which is in turn expressed in XML. In the PDF documents for example, XMP is used to describe the document as a whole, but it can be easily attached to parts (pages, inserted images ortags) that define the structural divisions of the document. This architecture proves very useful in marking the authorship and copyrights information about images, even if they are just part of a published document. It also makes the documents created from several smaller documents retain the original metadata associated with the parts.

Therefore, you can say that XMP is Adobe's XML-based specification for metadata regarding digital images and multimedia. Initially, the software development kit (SDK) for Adobe XMP was based on two projects, the Nautilus add-on XMP Manager and the exempi library and it was available under the GPL license. Now, the latest SDK release, 4.1.1, is available under the BSD license. The new release also comes with some interesting additions. One of them would be the XMPFiles component, that should locate, read and write metadata packets inside media file formats. Another significant addition is the Java implementation of the XMPCore. The Adobe officials also announced that the Adobe XMP SDK will use exempi2 as code base.

"We primarily get feedback from non-open source developers, but I have heard from a few open source ones. Together it made sense to clarify the license to both customers ...The BSD license was close to the SDK's preceding license. It also has the benefit of both being compatible with GPLed software and available for use in commercial products. Hopefully, the change makes the code more accessible and gets the community excited to use the SDK and build some interesting projects", stated Gunar Penikis, Adobe's XMP product manager, about the license change.