[Tango-artists] CC-SA & GPL Compatibility

[Jakub Steiner]

On Mon, 2005-11-07 at 11:00 -0600, Michael Schurter wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I want to distribute some Tango icons with my GPL'd PHP project, 
> OpenIT[1], but as far as I can tell the Creative Commons Share-Alike 
> license is incompatible with the GPL.
> 
> The FSF thinks its incompatible[2], and the Debian project does not 
> consider a free license.[3]
> 
> However, since Tango icons are intended for use on GPL licensed software 
> such as Gnome & KDE, I suspect I'm not understanding something.
> 
> To summarize:
> Can Tango icons be distributed with a GPL project?
> If not what is there another suggested license to use for my project?
> 
> Thanks for the great icon library,
> Michael Schurter
> 
> [1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/openit
> [2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#OtherLicenses
> [3] http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary.html
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> Tango-artists mailing list
> Tango-artists at lists.freedesktop.org
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Hi Michael,

Since our own interpretations of the licenses don't really mean
anything, we have forwarded this to the Novell legal department. We'll
discuss the result of their analysis on the list.

But if you're interested in my personal view on the matter, I believe
the spirit of both GPL and CC Share Alike is very similar. It is about
giving up some rights of the content creator to provide easier sharing
of the work. Both allow derivate works to be created and both include a
clause to always remain licensed in exactly the same terms.  If there
really are incompatibilities, I am convinced the CC and GPL people will
be interested in fixing them up as I cannot imagine free software
distributions would like to miss the opportunity to ship a growing
library of free content. This problem doesn't affect the Tango project
only, it is a lot broader.

The reason we chose the CC SA was that it doesn't talk about code, but
(artistic) works. There are a few points I can make about the debian
analysis, but again I haven't studied law and I'm not experienced in the
field to really give these words any credibility:

      * Both licenses have very similar goals - to provide freedoms to
        use, modify and distribute the work. The GPL unfortunately uses
        language specific to source code. 
      * None of the debian legal analysis talks about a major
        philosophical clash. It's all nuances, technical difficulties.
      * One of the nits in the debian legal analysis is the lacking
        ability to give proper credits as required by the CC SA license.
        We are currently embedding the license and authorship
        information in each single icon (not the bitmaps yet, but will
        be done as soon as the GIMP's metadata editor is in shape). I
        don't see a problem there.
      * I don't get the DRM agrument, the GPL is aiming at patents (in
        the next incarnation), the biggest showstopper for the free
        software movement. The EFF/free culture movement is aiming at
        DRM as the biggest showstopper for free media.
      * The logo trademark -- just like any other identity/logo, the
        clause allows to use it for showing the content is distributed
        under one of the CC licenses. I don't see why not being able to
        mess around with the logo makes the content non-GPL compatible.
        It doesn't seem to be a problem for Redhat Linux as it didn't
        seem to matter for Ximian GNOME distribution.
      * The CC SA have gone through at least two revisions (at v2.5
        now). The analysis appears to be based on v2.0.

So to answer your question - having GPL and CC SA incompatible would be
a huge defeat for both the free software movement and the free culture
movement. My feeling is that *if* there really are problems, they
can/will be solved. Tango project may be the motivator to solve them.

Yes, we want GPLed free software to ship with CC SA artwork and [3]
doesn't convince me you couldn't even before I have the reply from
Novell legal.

cheers

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