Re: Licence for Icons
On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 03:57:29PM +0000, Stefan V?lkel wrote:
> is there a licence for icons?
Eh? Any licence that expresses the icon author's wishes should suffice.
There's nothing special about icons in that sense.
> I'd like to include an extra icon in one of my packages (revelation). I
> asked the creator if it would be ok to include the icon. I think he is
> afraid that his Icon will be GPL'ed too (his answer was not that clear).
>
> I don't know what he is afraid of, but is there some official Debian
> document I could send him?
Nothing official I can think of, no.
What the icon creator may be worried about is the "derivative works" clause
of the GPL, which states that anything which is part of a work distributed
under the GPL must be distributed under those terms -- no part of the work
may be licenced with terms inconsistent with the GPL.
That's not a problem for the creator of the icon. If they haven't given
permission for the icon to be distributed in that fashion, they haven't lost
their rights to the icon or anything like that -- the person who infringed
their copyright in the one in the poo. That's a common misconception about
the GPL -- distributing something with a GPL'd work cannot "infect" the
other work with the GPL licence. It's just that if you can't distribute the
entire (combined) work under the GPL, you're not allowed to distribute any
of it. No danger to the copyright holder of the icon there.
If the creator of the icon does not licence the icon to the world at large
under a GPL-compatible licence, then you cannot redistribute a work
containing both that icon and GPL-licenced content. That's all their is to
it -- the icon doesn't magically become GPL-licenced because someone broke
the law.
For a more lucid treatment of this topic, I suggest you ask in d-legal.
- Matt
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