[Tango-artists] License question

[Rodney Dawes]

Hi,

We aren't lawyers, so anything said on this list can't be taken as
acceptable legal advice. If you are looking for legal advice, the best
people to ask, would be the legal counsel for the company in question,
whom is releasing the code you mentioned.

That said, the tango-icon-theme icons are licensed under Creative
Commons Attribution Share-alike 2.5. The gnome-icon-theme icons are
licensed under GNU/GPL 2.0. If you intend to ship icons that are under
a different license than the program you are including them with, you
will need to include a copy of the license for the icons as well, with
the package. This is best put into a COPYING.icons file. If you are
shipping multiple icons, under different licenses, you will also need
to clarify what is under what license.

If you are going to use the tango-icon-theme icons, you will have to
also provide appropriate attribution. This is generally done with an
"Icons provided by the Tango Desktop Project" label with a link to the
http://tango.freedesktop.org/ site. Generally, this is placed in the
about box dialog.

If on *nix systems, you are using GTK+ or KDE for your application, it
is suggested that you use the Icon Theme API provided in those toolkits,
to request icons from the theme, so that your icons will always match
appropriately.

If you could provide more information about this program, and a link to
where we could grab the source to look at, we could help you determine
what icons could/should be used in the interface as well.

-- dobey


On Sat, 2007-09-08 at 18:20 +0200, Gael Varoquaux wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am currently working on making a Debian package of some code released
> by a company. The code is under a BSD-like license. The company was using
> proprietary icons, a lot of them. I have to change them to a 
> OSI-compatible-licensed icons. I'd love to use some of project Tango's
> icons, but, first of all we really want the code to remain BSD-licensed,
> and the company wants to keep using the code as a library for their
> proprietary applications.
> 
> For what I understood Tango is under CC-BY-SA. Does somebody know what is
> understood as "share alike". Is the code part of the "share-alike"
> clause, or only the modified icons, if any ? If the code is not part of
> the "share-alike" clause, am I right thinking that it can still be both
> BSD, and used in commercial applications ?
> 
> By the way, as there must be some icons experts on this list, does
> someone know the license of the Gnome icons (if you can eply I don't have
> to subscribe to yet another mailing list) ? I tend to think it is LGPL.
> If so can I use them in the library I am packaging ? The same questions as
> for the Tango icons apply: what is considered as derived work ? Can code
> using LGPL icons still be BSD ? And proprietary ?
> 
> Sorry for asking these stupid questions, I don't know much about
> licensing.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Gaël