[Fwd: Licensing Policy for non-code?]

[Filipus Klutiero]

I discovered that kde-policies was really a dead list after sending the 
included message, so I'm forwarding it here.

-------- Message original --------
Sujet: 	Licensing Policy for non-code?
Date: 	Thu, 05 Oct 2006 19:19:19 -0400
De: 	Filipus Klutiero <ido at vif.ca>
Pour: 	kde-policies at lists.kde.org



Hi,
more than a week ago I went to #kde-devel asking if there was a 
licensing policy for content other than source code, such as artwork, 
since http://developer.kde.org/policies/licensepolicy.html only covers 
source code. After some time without getting a clear answer, Maksim 
Orlovich suggested me to ask on mailing lists.

Ideally, someone would point me to a previous discussion on this topic 
that I missed. Otherwise, let me elaborate a bit. The reason I am asking 
is that I use a GNU/Linux distribution whose policy disallows inclusion 
of non-modifiable material. This distribution includes an apparently 
non-modifiable Firefox icon (kdebase/pics/crystalsvg/). As crystalsvg 
contains other similar icons, it's clear that a full investigation of 
the contents should be done if the distributor wants to be sure that 
there are no other policy violations. I was asked if I volunteered to do 
such an investigation. I do not know if I will, but if KDE does nothing 
to help distributors with similar policies, it's probably better to 
abandon the idea of cleaning the packages and only fixing policy 
violations as they are reported, unless the distributor wants to review 
each new file.

Before sending this mail, I contacted Stephan Binner, who committed the 
Firefox logo to kdebase a little more than 2 years ago, to make sure 
that it was indeed an original non-modifiable Firefox logo and not an 
imitation under a free license. It turns out that he doesn't even 
remember where the icon comes from. So, if there's no licensing policy 
for content other than source code, distributors would still appreciate 
if there was a requirement to document which files are not modifiable 
(and perhaps other criteria), under which license these files are 
distributed, and where/who they are from.