[Tango-artists] CC-SA & GPL Compatibility

[Jakub Steiner]

Hi Josselin,
like I said I shouldn't be getting into legal discussions before I can
show the reply from Novell legal dept. The reason why we chose CC-BY-SA
was on a recommendation of Novell legal dept. In future we intend to
ship Tango icon theme and have GPLed software use the set.

Also I should point out gnome icon theme is not LGPL, but GPL. But I was
always puzzled by the language though. What is a "program" in an icon
theme? The GPL almost always talks about a program. What is a source
code for a bitmap icon? How does linking relate to an icon? Does
everyone using the gnome icon theme icons on the web violate the GPL?
The tango icon theme is a set of icons, it's not a program. Currently
GNOME desktop used to accesses the gnome icon theme artwork through
libgnomeui library which is LGPL. Now it happens in GTK+ which is GPL.
We probably want to create a desktop-agnostic lookup library which will
most likely be GPL or LGPL in the tango project.

For me, the same or even bigger cloud of confusion surrounds the GPL
applied on artwork. That's why I leave the legal decisions on people who
deal with this as their job.

cheers

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