[Tango-artists] Why not LGPL

[Rodney Dawes]

On Thu, 2006-09-21 at 07:59 +0200, jEsuSdA 8) wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> In the Debian mail list someone says that it is not possible include 
> tango icon theme by default on the Debian distro because CC is not 100% 
> compatible with FSF GPL (or LGPL).
> 
> They want to include this icon theme because they are in proccess to 
> changing the look of Debian (future etch release on december) but 
> because this reason they can't.
> 
> I have some questions about this:
> 
> ¿It is true that Tango CC license is not compatible with GPL or LGPL 
> projects ?

Yes. Although, it depends on what one considers as a compatibility
issue. Technically the LGPL and GPL themselves aren't 100% compatible.
You can't take an LGPL icon, make a new icon derived from it, and put
the new icon under the GPL. The new icon must remain under the LGPL.
The issue here that people seem to complain about, is the attribution
clause in the CC Attribution Share-alike license.

> ¿Why you chose CC and not LGPL or GPL?

We didn't choose to use the license. And I wouldn't choose to use LGPL
or GPL either, if I had the choice to make. I would write a more
appropriate license targetted directly at graphical artwork.

> ¿There are plains to change licence in the future?

I would like to, but doing so requires The Lawyers who told us that we
must use CC Attribution Share-alike 2.5, that we are allowed to change
to another specific license.

> ¿It will possible to license dually Tango icon theme (LGPL for Free 
> Software Project and CC for the rest)?

Dual-licensing is one of the worst legal concoctions that free software
people have ever come up with. I refuse to support it for any project.

-- dobey