Licensing policy for breeze-icons

Carl Schwan carl at carlschwan.eu
Thu Dec 19 23:11:57 GMT 2024


Hi,

The licensing policy for icons is a bit weird. It allow usage of any of our authorized licenses e.g. MIT, BSD,
LGPL-2.1-or-later ... but at the same time restrict it to "LGPL-3.0-only OR LicenseRef-KDE-Accepted-LGPL"
for the breeze-icons and oxygen-icons repositories, which is the primary sources of icons in KDE. See:

> 9. Icons should be licenced as CC-BY-SA 4.0 or can also be licenced under any of the terms
in section 4 or 5 or 8. Icons in oxygen-icons and breeze-icons themes must be licenced under
the "LGPL-3.0-only OR LicenseRef-KDE-Accepted-LGPL", i.e. LGPL 3 or later versions approved
by KDE e.V.

I don't really see a reason why icons submitted in breeze-icons and oxygen-icons must be
LGPL-3.0-or-later, particularly if the submitter wants to use a more permissive license. This also
conflicts with the paragraph 4 of the policy which requires frameworks to be licensed under
LGPL-2.1-or-later or more permissive licenses.

We won't be able to change the license of breeze-icons but at least we should allow new icons
to be licensed under more permissive licenses.

Cheers,
Carl


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