[Tango-artists] [Question] Tango icons and GPL

[Jakub Steiner]

On Sun, 2007-07-01 at 19:46 +0200, Patrick Niklaus wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm from the Compiz Fusion (aka Beryl aka Compiz) project.
> 
> In our settings manager we use a quite big amount of icons, which use
> the tango guildlines (or try to...) and are licensed under GPL but do
> not contain any of your icons from the tango-icon-theme set yet.
> 
> It's quite obvious that there is a real duplication of work going on
> since we had to create every part of the icons ourselves. So I asked
> myself if it would be possible to use icons or parts of icons form the
> Tango project (which are licensed under ShareALike 2.5) in our icon
> set.
> I already talked to some of you in IRC and they told me that it's not
> possible to distribute Sharealike icons in a GPL project.
> 
> However I'm searching for a way how to solve this license problem. I
> would really like to use some of your icons but how?
> 
> Since I only want to use specific icons (not the whole set), would it
> be possible to relicense these icons in sense of dual-licensing them?
> So you would have a GPL and ShareALike license for your icon, if that
> is possible.

Hi Patrick,
just like you, we're hit by the GPL vs CCBYSA incompatibilities. We're
duplicating the whole desktop theme at this very moment (gnome icon
theme). There has been many licensing discussions on the list, you can
check the archives to see Rodney's take on why dual licensing doesn't
really solve anything. 

If you are looking for GPLed assets, feel free to scavenge the
gnome-icon-theme trunk. The oxygen guys seems to be licensing their
artwork as CCBYSA as well so I'm looking forward to see if they are able
to resolve the issue with GPL.

cheers

-- 
Jakub Steiner <jimmac at novell.com>
Novell, Inc.