Re: Help about texture inclueded in stellarium
Well, I did the rest in one message since the comments were short.
* Mars texture map is from James Hastings-Trew's collection.
Is there any information known about the origin of this? That's really
necessary before you can legally distribute it. If James Hastings-Trew took
the pictures, a license is needed from him; if someone other person or
organization did so, we need to know who!
* Moon texture map is Courtesy USGS Astrogeology Research Program,
http://astrogeology.usgs.gov. (Public Domain)
Correct, USGS stuff is really public domain (and DFSG-free).
* The snowy landscape textures are from the GPL game tuxracer.
Tuxracer 0.61 claims to be copyright Jasmin F. Patry. I hope, therefore, that
he got copyright assignments from his art team (credited as Richard Knowles
and Mark Riddell). If not, tuxracer has a small problem. :-P Anyway,
assuming they're taken from that version, I suppose I would trust upstream.
Of course, you have to put the "Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001 Jasmin F. Patry"
notice and the notice saying that it's available under GPL.
* The fullsky milky way panorama is created by Axel Mellinger,
University
of Potsdam, Germany. Further information and more pictures
available from
http://home.arcor-online.de/axel.mellinger/
* All messiers nebula pictures except m31, Orion and the Pleiades
from
the Grasslands Observatory : http://www.3towers.com
* M31, Orion and the Pleiades pictures come from Herm Perez :
http://home.att.net/~hermperez/default.htm
Copyright subsists automatically in photographs in most countries (apparently
not Canada, I hear).
It appears that these photographers haven't granted any permission to
redistribute, let alone modify. You need express permission of some sort for
anyone to copy, modify, and distribute (modified or unmodified) for these
works to go in 'main'.
Also, at the very least, you need express permission for Debian's mirror
network to distribute them for these works to go in 'non-free'!
So you definitely need to contact those photographers.
This is the unfortunate effect of the current "unconditional copyright" laws
present in most of the world, under which everything is copyrighted by
default. Prior to 1976, the US had "conditional copyright" laws, under which
you had to actually intentionally claim copyright on a publicly distributed
work (by putting a notice on it) in order for it to be copyrighted. Don't
you wish it still did? :-P
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