Question about xdg-sound-theme licensing

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 10.09.10 17:18, Brian Cameron (brian.cameron at oracle.com) wrote:

> 
> I would file a bug if xdg-sound-theme had a category in fdo bugster, but
> it does not.  The xdg-sound-theme website says to contact this xdg
> mailing list for issues, so I hope this is the correct place to discuss.
> 
> I am attaching the README file for xdg-sound-theme 0.6.  It has the
> following two lines which are confusing me:
> 
>        Andreas Karlsson under the Creative Commons ShareAlike 2.0
>        Ivica Ico Bukvic under Creative Commons Share-Alike 3.0
>        Unported

> 
> However, looking at the Creative Commons website, neither of these
> licenses exist:
> 
>   http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/

Hmm? What about these?

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

> So, I am wondering how these files are licensed, and if the README file
> is in error.  It seems that a non-existant license is being listed for
> these files.  At the very least, I think this should be corrected and
> it might make sense to not use a retired license.

Well, when we put this together we mostly copied wha was stated in the
original sources, i.e. gnome-audio and a couple of other sound themes
found on the net that hade san licenses.

> Overall, it seems that this module has a lot of licenses.  It also
> would be nice to ping the authors and see if it might be possible to
> license this module under more simply under a single (or at least
> fewer) licenses.  

Well, we'd be happy if somebody would do this. Note however that Jon and
I did only the minimum necessary to put together a somewhat useful sound
theme, mostly because we had to have something to offer in this area,
not because were particularly keen on working in this area.

The sound theme could definitely use some love.

Note that Canonical actually started to work on an improved sound
theme. Unfortunately they made expressly clear to me that they are not
willing to contribute any of their work upstream, even though we were
always looking for people who'd give the theme some more love. Pity.

If somebody wants to look into this it might be a good idea to integrate
some of the stuff from Canonical into the upstream theme. If their
licensing permits it, then this should be an easy thing to do, even if
they themselves are not interested in contributing this.

> It might be nice to use a single CreativeCommons license instead of so
> many different ones, if the authors are agreeable.  Why have some
> files with both the Attiribution ShareAlike 2.0 and 3.0 versions of
> the license, for example.  I would imagine the authors would be
> agreeable to switch to the latest version of the license if asked.
> I'd cc: them, but the module doesn't provide any contact details.

Well, we copied the author data from the original READMEs of the various
themes, many of which didn't list any email address however. It
shouldn't be too hard tracking this down with google however.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.