[Tango-artists] relicensing tango-icon-theme

[Rodney Dawes]

Finally I am replying to this. Comments below. :)

On Tue, 2008-07-08 at 13:38 +0200, Jakub Steiner wrote:
> 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 definitely agree that we have been needing to change the license.
However, I don't think making the icon theme itself be Public Domain,
is necessarily the best route. However, Novell's willingness to place
the artwork for which they have been assigned copyright into the Public
Domain, releasing that copyright, is great news, and fits well with
the idea I have for the future of the Tango artwork. It is proposed
below.

> 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.

Let's get a list of all of the contributors, and get confirmations from
them to release their work under Public Domain. The sooner we can get
confirmation from everyone, the sooner we can get stuff reorganized and
licensed in an appropriate manner.

> 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.

The difference is that they can claim ownership and you can't do
anything about it. With LGPL, BSD, GPL, CCbySA, or similar licenses,
where Copyright is clear and must be properly attributed, you can take
action. 

> 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.

The build scripts are irrelevant. They are just data files to tell
external tools how to build the software. Any similar piece of software
is going to have approximately equal files to do this. The one-canvas
workflow is great for creating icons. It's not so great for making an
icon theme, though. I suggest we simply use the one-canvas method to
store the "source" for the icons. You (the artists) can just worry about
creating icons and putting them in the tree. I (the maintainer) will
worry about automating all the build stuff. If everything is going to be
in single files, we're going to need a build system to extract them into
multiple files. I would prefer for that to be automated, so that you
don't have to worry about updating Makefiles or configure scripts, or
any of that. We also need the build system to handle translating the
index.theme and any .icon files that are translatable, as we do now.

> Let's resurrect and scavenge the good that's left in tango icon theme!

And now on to my proposal. I think the best way to go about this is not
to make tango-icon-theme Public Domain, but to create a new repository
which houses the Public Domain elements which make up the icons we offer
in tango-icon-theme. This new module could be tango-icon-assets or
something similar, and would contain just the assets in SVG form (in the
one-canvas workflow style), such as "paper sheet" and "error emblem".
Everything in this module would be Public Domain, and there would be no
need for any build system work at all, as it is purely a repository of
building blocks for creating full icons.

>From there, we can make tango-icon-theme into an LGPL icon theme, made
up of the public domain assets. This module would provide a clearer
licensing scheme, for developers to be confident about using our icons.
This would also provide a nice method of allowing contributors to submit
icons based off the tango assets for inclusion, but who do not wish to
relinquish copyright in doing so. There icons could be LGPL, yet the
parts that comprise them, could be Public Domain, save for minor
differences.

We could also pull over some of the Public Domain assets into other
icons and themes, such as OpenOffice.org and gnome-icon-theme, without
issue. The paper sheet for example would be a great place to start
doing that.

Also, I would much prefer using SVN to git, for the repository server.
I don't think git necessarily fits with our goals, as there's no need
for anyone to be maintaining an external repository, and then suggesting
we pull changes from there. Submitting assets and icons via the mailing
list and bugzilla are sufficient for our needs, I believe.

I think this would satisfy everything we've been trying to do with
Tango, but have yet been unable to do, or have done in a very limited
way, because of the licensing. And I believe this fits in very well
with Novell's approval to release these assets to the Public Domain.
This would give us the repository of assets that several have been
asking for (lots of people have been wanting a "library" of icons),
let us have a clearly licensed theme, and have our assets be public
domain, so that anyone can use them and create new icons with them.
We could also migrate to the one-canvas workflow, and your new
TangoNG icons, in this "new" theme, and make everyone happy.

What do you think?

-- Rodney