[Tango-artists] relicensing tango-icon-theme

[Simon Otter]

This is sweeeeet!

Den 2008-07-08 13:38:22 skrev Jakub Steiner <jimmac at gmail.com>:

> Hello fellow tango artists!
>
> One of the most frequent debates here has been the licensing surrounding
> the tango style's first implementation, the tango-icon-theme. Licensed
> Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.5, it has been problematic to
> ship along with GPLed software and create derivative artwork for many
> major software projects. The licensing has created a barrier where we
> needed quick adoption.
>
> A lot of time has been wasted recreating the same asset in
> gnome-icon-theme and OpenOffice. So I'm relieved that after a _long_
> debate with Novell legal and the open source review board, Novell is
> agreeing to relicense its share of tango-icon-theme under a more liberal
> license. The talk has been about CC-BY-SAv3, LGPL, but in the end the
> license that is the least restricting and clear wrt to artwork (as
> opposed to code) is giving up copyright and going Public Domain. This
> will allow the assets to be used in free software regardless of the
> projects' license as well as proprietary software. Huge thanks goes out
> to Michael Meeks who has been the negotiator finally managing getting
> this through.
>
> I've done the majority of work on tango icon theme, but there is a lot
> more contributors. I'd like to ask everyone to either approve or refuse
> their work to be relicensed to public domain. I have cc:ed people listed
> in the AUTHORS file. Luckily I have been mandating people to provide the
> authorship metadata in the SVGs themself, so we can figure this out on a
> per-icon basis.
>
> One negative aspect of the theme may be that people are free to claim
> authorship of your work. But realistically, people who do that, will do
> it regardless of the license (as has been seen on many occasions in the
> past). We can simply keep on kindly asking for people to give proper
> credits to the tango project and linking to the website. Suggest rather
> than mandate.
>
> I don't know how this applies to the autotools scripts and
> configurations. I would take this opportunity and suggest to start from
> scratch on the new 'tango-icon-theme'[1]. Create a git repository on
> freedesktop in place of the clumsy CVS, stop worrying about legacy
> (icon-naming-utils), stop depending on a build system for an icon theme,
> and simply use an artist-friendly workflow to edit icons in vector form.
> I have been very happy using a one-canvas workflow I will follow up on.
>
> Let's resurrect and scavenge the good that's left in tango icon theme!
>
> cheers
>
> [1] I actually have -- http://jimmac.musichall.cz/i.php?i=Tango-NG



-- 

simon at otter.se