[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] PDF icon: licensing concern & fix

Dan Scott dan at coffeecode.net
Thu May 17 00:13:25 EDT 2012


On Tue, May 08, 2012 at 09:35:31AM -0400, Dan Scott wrote:
> Hi all:
> 
> I'm kind of regretting bringing this up in the first place, but as I
> don't think we have any copyright lawyers on either the communications
> team or the oversight board, since I started this discussion, I'll take
> point on tracking down an authoritative answer.
> 
> For what it's worth, the PDF icon at
> http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdeartwork/IconThemes/primary/scalable/mimetypes/application-pdf.svgz?view=log
> is also licensed under the LGPL at
> http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdeartwork/IconThemes/primary/LICENSE?view=markup
> 
> For the short term, in my (I am not a lawyer and this does not
> constitute legal advice) opinion, I think it should be fine to include
> the KDE icon in question as long as we reproduce the license and note
> the provenance of the icon.
> 
> For example, keep the license file + icon in a separate directory and
> point to the location of the icon in the KDE repository, and perhaps
> note the exception in the docs themselves (which, come to think of it,
> should probably have a clear "licensing" section noting that the bulk of
> the content is licensed CC-BY-SA, with the exception of the LGPL icon;
> there may be more exceptions in the future - note there's a whole
> _other_ can of worms that arises due to our decision to license the
> documentation solely under the CC-BY-SA rather than under both the
> CC-BY-SA and the GPL, but we can and should discuss that separately).
> 
> We should of course always strive for perfect compliance, but if we're
> looking at this from a risk management perspective, I suspect it's not
> likely that the KDE project would go after our project aggressively.
> If they believed we were not in compliance with their license and
> intent, they would most likely just send us a nice email.
> 
> I'll come back with a more authoritative answer later, but I think we
> can move ahead if we take this fairly cautious approach.

So... after talking with Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom
Conservancy, it seems that the best possible outcome would be if KDE
agreed to allow us to license the icon under the same CC-BY-SA 3.0
(Unported) license that our documentation uses.

Failing that, as the response Alexey received seems to indicate, Bradley
suggests that we can go ahead and use the icon as long as we also
include the full text of the corresponding LGPL in the documentation. We
should include a preface that says something like "The icon <foo> comes
from the KDE project at <url> and is licensed under the GNU Lesser
General Public License 3.0" (ensuring we match the license of the icon
exactly). Then include the text license verbatim from
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.txt

If we put this under a "Licensing" appendix, then we could also include
a notice that the docs are under the CC-BY-SA.


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