[Clipart] Licence problems?

[Alan Horkan]

On Tue, 15 Aug 2006, Florent Monnier wrote:

> Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 20:58:40 +0200
> From: Florent Monnier <fmonnier at linux-nantes.fr.eu.org>
> To: clipart at lists.freedesktop.org
> Subject: Re: [Clipart] Licence problems?
>
> Hello,
> > But I find some difficulties for practical usage of OpenClipart.org
> > resources.

Help wanted, apply withing  ;)

> > In example, I am writting small application and I want some simple
> > graphic for icons, like "save" "load" "password" "lock" "delete" and so
> > on. And now

> You could use the icons set of either the applications using GTK which are
> considered as belonging to the Gnome environment, or the icons set ot the K
> applications using Qt which belong to the KDE environment.

You should definately use the icons provided by your development
toolkit, doing otherwise will make your application look inconsistent
and out of place in whatever enviroment you are developing for.

In the case of software and embedding images into your applications
licensing issues do matter so again you would be well advised to keep it
simple and use whatever icons are provided by the toolkit and avoid any
legal worries since the toolkit already allow you to use the icons they
provide.

> I don't know if the G icons are SVG or bitmap, but it seems that for the
> K-apps everything is in SVG.

The standard Gnome icons are raster (bitmap) graphics but SVG themes for
Gnome do also exist.

> > 1. I have trouble finding such images, IMHO the search engine could be
> > improved or redesigned some how
> >
> > 2. License... Most resource do not have any License informations, so I
> > do not know.. can I use them in commercial project?
>
> It is simple: everything in the OCAL (Open Clip-Art Library) is Public-Domain
> CC-pd  ::  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain

... and techincally speaking Public Domain isn't a license.

Public Domain means you can do whatever you like with the images.  Slice
'em, dice 'em, mix and match 'em, change the colours to pink and yellow if
you like.  Legally you can even claim you created them yourself but that
wouldn't be very polite, and it would still be plagiarism.

-- 
Alan H.