Re: gnome-themes and licensing

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

Alan Cox wrote:
> 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.

Actually, gnome-themes itself no longer contains any source code. The 
engines where separated out into gtk-engines some while back. The only 
type of files found in gtk-engines should now be images and text files. 
The only binary data installed by gnome-themes would be any PNG images.


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


The FSF recommends[1] not to use any Creative Commons licenses, but to 
use the Free Art license as an alternative. It then states the the Free 
Art license is incompatible with the GNU GPL and GNU FDL, and advices 
not to use it. It seems the only license they recommend is one of their 
own as they state that all the licenses are incompatible.

So the problem still is that many artists no longer want to use the GPL, 
and the FDL isn't ideal for artwork either. So are we stuck with using 
the GPL for artwork to avoid any problems? If it was clear what license 
each theme or file in the gnome-themes module was under, would this 
prevent any problems distributors might have?


-Thomas

[1] http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#OtherLicenses