[Tango-artists] Why cant Tango Icons be GPL ?

[Rodney Dawes]

On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 16:30 -0600, Bryan Petty wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 6:46 AM, Andreas Nilsson <nisses.mail at home.se> wrote:
> >  I wasn't able to figure out if Filezilla is using GTK+ or not, but
> >  judging from the screenshots [1], it look like it is.
> 
> FileZilla 3 is being developed on top of wxWidgets (under the
> wxWindows Licence -- LGPL with an exception clause), which does use
> GTK+ on Linux. There has been some discussion [1] a while back on
> writing a wxTangoArtProvider which would be sufficient for this, and
> provide many wxWidgets applications the ability to easily use Tango
> icons on all platforms, but there are some issues that were never
> worked out.
> 
> Applications built on wxGTK could easily use the icon naming utilities
> just fine, but unless those utilities work on the other platforms,
> they would need to be written up to do so. This would of course be
> much easier if the Tango icons released under a LGPL/GPL license, but
> if the icon naming utilities can make this possible on GTK+, then it
> certainly should be possible under Windows and Mac.

The icon-naming-utils package has nothing to do with the overall
functionality of the theme itself. It is merely a script which provides
symlinks for compatibility for applications that use older deprecated
names, so that they will continue to have icons without immediately
renaming things. The tango-icon-theme package is almost certainly not
going to be relicensed. However, as stated already several times in this
and other threads the gnome-icon-theme package provides icons in the
Tango style, and at a much greater level of completeness than
tango-icon-theme. 

> [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.wxwidgets.general/54195/focus=54200
> 
> Unfortunately, I don't have the necessary experience to work out the
> licensing issues, or write up the implementation.

It might be best to write an art provider for the gnome-icon-theme
package, and hopefully we will be able to relicense the gnome-icon-theme
package to LGPL for the next GNOME release. This would let the art
provider for wx also be LGPL, and would allow the greatest number of
applications to use both wx and the art provider for it, as well as
having tango styled icons.