Bug#678746: desktop-base: Joy theme is a mix of incompatibly-licensed works
Package: desktop-base
Version: 7.0.0~exp2
Severity: serious
Justification: Policy 2.3
Hello,
I read about the new Joy theme [1][2].
[1] http://blog.pault.ag/post/25614704596/my-quest-to-get-desktop-base-set-before-wheezy
[2] http://blog.pault.ag/post/25747178764/debian-desktop-7-0-0-exp2-in-experimental
It looks nice, but it seems to have licensing issues.
In the debian/copyright file [3] I read:
| The Joy theme is © 2012 Adrien Aubourg and released under the CC-BY-SA 3.0
| license.
|
| The Joy plymouth theme is Copyright © 2009 Canonical Ltd.,
| Copyright © 2010 Aurélien COUDERC and Copyright © 2012 Jonathan Carter under
| the GPLv2+, with work from Adrien Aubourg under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License.
|
| The Joy KDM, GDM and KSplash grub theme are © 2012 Paul Tagliamonte and released
| under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license, with work from all the previous authors, and
| Adrien Aubourg.
[3] http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/d/desktop-base/desktop-base_7.0.0~exp2/copyright
First of all, these debian/copyright paragraphs fail to acknowledge that
the Joy theme is based on the Debian “Open Use” (without “Debian” word)
logo. But this may be fixed easily.
The major issue seems to be that the Joy plymouth theme mixes parts
released under CC-by-sa-v3.0 and parts released under GPLv2+.
Since CC-by-sa-v3.0 is incompatible with GPLv2+, I would say that the
resulting work is legally undistributable.
The same issue seems to hold for the Joy KDM, GDM and KSplash grub theme,
since it said to incorporate "work from all the previous authors".
If "all the previous authors" includes Aurélien COUDERC and/or
Jonathan Carter, it seems that their work is under GPLv2+ and thus
the incompatibility of CC-by-sa-v3.0 again kicks in.
(For the record, I am also convinced that CC-by-sa-v3.0 fails to
meet the DFSG, but that's another story, since FTP masters disagree
with me, unfortunately).
I hope the incompatibility issue may be fixed soon for the Joy theme.
Since everything else in the desktop-base package is GPL-compatible,
I strongly recommend to persuade Adrien Aubourg and Paul Tagliamonte
to re-license their work under the terms of the GNU GPL v2 or later.
Or, at least, to dual-license it under CC-by-sa-v3.0 and GPLv2+.
(In the latter case, the complete text of CC-by-sa-v3.0 should be
included in the debian/copyright file, though.)
Bye and thanks for your time.
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