[Tango-artists] license proposal : CC-SA || LGPL

[Alexandre Rostovtsev]

Hello all,

As far as I can make out, the current license of Tango icons (CC-SA)
is, in the eyes of FSF  and Debian, incompatible with 99% of Linux
software. However, there are good reasons for the choice of CC-SA. So,
my proposal is to change the license to (CC-SA || LGPL), i.e

"these icons can be redistributed and/or modified under either the
Creative Commons Share Alike 2.5 licence or LGPL 2.1, whichever one
you choose".

Reasons:

The CC-SA license is a natural choice for artists; artists know what
the various CC provisions mean, there are already many works available
under CC licenses, and as long as everything is CC, you can combine
them like lego blocks. People who make websites, for example, very
often use some sort of CC license, so having the icons available under
CC-SA would be very good.

On the other hand, the GNU licenses are a natural choice for
programmers. Programmers know what LGPL means and how they can use the
icons; they can be sure they are not poisoning the license the rest of
their code uses. And LGPL is a popular license for icons -- for
example, the stock Gtk icons are under the LGPL. Also, LGPL means that
Tango could be included in distros with strict freedom guidelines.

So why LGPL instead of GPL? First, for compatibility with Gtk stock
icons (which might get replaced by Tango some day); and second,
because LGPL doesn't have linking restrictions (so that loading an
icon theme from your hard drive is guaranteed to not change the
license of your code).

I think that if the license is to be changed, it should be done as
soon as possible, before the number of contributors grows too large
(since every contributor will have to agree to the new license). And
if the license is not changed to something GNU-compatible, it will
cause significant difficulties down the road; Debian will be almost
guaranteed to drop Tango, and many other projects will follow suit.

By the way, the Oxygen[1] folk will release the final version of their
iconset under LGPL.
-Alex Rostovtsev

[1] http://www.oxygen-icons.org/?page_id=4