Re: gnome-themes and licensing

[Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>]

On Sad, 2006-04-15 at 13:16 +0100, Thomas Wood wrote:
> With 2.16 now underway, I thought it was about time to give the 
> gnome-themes module a bit of a revamp. However, many of todays artists 
> want to use licenses other than the GPL to distribute their work (for 
> example, the Creative Commons "By Attribution" license[1], or the Free 
> Art license[2]). This would mean that parts of the gnome-themes module 
> would no longer be GPL or LGPL. 

This would only matter if the license was not GPL or LGPL compatible.
Freer than LGPL ought to be fine.

The "Free" Art license allows restriction of modification rights, which
appears to make it non-free if used (like the GNU document license
mess), and cannot be combined with non-free programs using the desktop,
so would create the ludicrous situation of the theme manager forcing the
user to change theme when they ran say realplayer, or they installed the
mp3 plugin

It is also subject to French law alone and from the translation looks
like it would have serious problems in any other jurisdiction - for
example most countries would not recognize the french law requirement,
and since there is no legal statement about how the license fails if a
clause is invalid the entire license probably goes with it.

A second consideration is that themes also contain code so the GPL or
LGPL boundary there must be respected whether it applies to artwork that
depends upon the code or not.

The FSF keeps some good information on licenses and compatibility - eg
creative commons.

Alan