[Tango-artists] Commercial closed Source Application and Tango Icons

[Rodney Dawes]

On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 12:19 -0700, William Szilveszter wrote:
> Dobey,
> 
> I dont think there is any ambiguity in the license. It states very
> clearly that one is permitted "to make commercial use of the work."
> As for derivative work, the elongated  criterion is as such:
> 
> ""Derivative Work" means a work based upon the Work or upon the Work
> and other pre-existing works, such as a translation, musical
> arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version,
> sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any
> other form in which the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted,
> except that a work that constitutes a Collective Work will not be
> considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this License. For the
> avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical composition or sound
> recording, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a
> moving image ("synching") will be considered a Derivative Work for the
> purpose of this License."
> 
> This information is available here:
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/legalcode
> 
> I think that explanation is more than sufficient.

But it isn't. Use in commercial collective works is fine. That basically
means shipping the theme in a commercial distribution. The license does
not explicitly say that you may embed the icons in proprietary
applications, and the derivitive works clause is not clear whether or
not the application which the icons are embedded in, is a derivitive
work or not. It implies to me that it is a derivitive work, and
therefore must be also licensed as CC-By-SA 2.5. It is basically left up
to legal interpretation at this point, and none of us are lawyers. This
is why I have sent this issue, among others, to a team of lawyers. It
seems I am going to have to prod them with a 20K volt taser or something
though to get their attention. Hopefully I'll actually be able to get a
response out of them soon. :-/

-- dobey