Licensing policy for breeze-icons

Ingo Klöcker kloecker at kde.org
Fri Dec 20 10:02:51 GMT 2024


On Freitag, 20. Dezember 2024 00:11:57 Mitteleuropäische Normalzeit Carl 
Schwan wrote:
> 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.

Very likely this has historical reasons combined with the fact that it used to 
be very difficult to properly license individual images (or any other binary 
artifacts). With REUSE, etc. this may have changed, but there's still the 
problem that the license is separated from the image file itself (either in an 
individual .license file or "hidden" in a global .toml file). Using a common 
license for all images avoids the mess.

We could consider allowing different licenses for individual icons. In this 
case I would strongly recommend to require individual .license files to make it 
easy to see that an image uses another license than most other images.

I'm wondering how the icon licenses relate to the icon library we now ship on 
many platforms. I guess for the library "LGPL-3.0-only OR LicenseRef-KDE-
Accepted-LGPL" would be okay even if it contains icons with more permissive 
licenses.

Regards,
Ingo
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