[theme-reviewers] Licensing

[Jean-Nicolas Kuttler]

On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 05:59:39PM -0500, Chip Bennett wrote:
> But, as it currently stands, such fonts are excluded from eligibility for 
> inclusion with themes hosted by wordpress.org (even though the fonts are 
> freely usable, distributable, and modifiable - and can even be sold, albeit as 
> part of a package and not by themselves).

The Fedora project maintains a list of GPL-compatible licenses for fonts at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal_considerations_for_fonts#Approved_font_licenses
Fonts that are FSF free are ok.

> > > 1) A listing of known GPL-compatible icon sets would be awfully handy in
> > > the Codex.
> > 
> > Anyone is welcome to start and maintain such a list.

Gnome icons should all be GPL, and parts of some sets are certainly usable for themes.

http://art.gnome.org/themes/icon

> > Icon sets like Silk are fairly nice, and common.  Has anyone asked the
> > author about providing them under other terms besides CC?
> 
> Never hurts to ask, eh?

Famfamfam silk icons are compatible as well as I understand it:

"As an author, I would appreciate a reference to my authorship of the Silk icon set contents within a readme file or equivalent documentation for the software which includes the set or a subset of the icons contained within."

http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/

> And I take it from the question, there isn't much likelihood that CC-By-SA (or 
> similarly) licensed icon sets would be considered as acceptable for inclusion 
> in wordpress.org repository-hosted themes?

Hm. I don't see any problem with CC-By-SA per se.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Of course the attribution can become a problem depending on what kind of attribution the author wants. It might be easier to just not accept CC-By-SA to avoid endless discussions.

Nicolas

--
Nicolas Kuttler
wp at nkuttler.de

http://www.nkuttler.de
http://www.nicolaskuttler.de (deutsch)