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Bug#678746: marked as done (desktop-base: Joy theme is a mix of incompatibly-licensed works)

Your message dated Sun, 24 Jun 2012 18:43:12 +0200
with message-id <20120624164312.GD5451@radis.cristau.org>
and subject line Re: Bug#678746: desktop-base: Joy theme is a mix of incompatibly-licensed works
has caused the Debian Bug report #678746,
regarding desktop-base: Joy theme is a mix of incompatibly-licensed works
to be marked as done.

This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with.
If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.

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-- 
678746: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=678746
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--- Begin Message --- 
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.

--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message --- 
On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 07:34:50 -0400, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:

> > 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.
> 
> This *might* be true if it was two bits of code that get linked
> together, but since Plymouth (and the plugin, which is GPLv2) only
> render the CC-BY-SA 3.0 work, it should be fine.
> 
Quite.  Closing.

Cheers,
Julien

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