Tango for Free!

Jimmac announced today on the Tango Mailing List that thanks to about a bazillion requests and the negotiation skills of Michael Meeks, the Tango Icon Library will be changing licenses from CCASA2.5 to Public Domain. Yes, folks, free as in free. Put those beautiful icons in any app you want; they're yours!

There are a few sticky issues that have to be resolved; the free icons will likely publish from a new repository, and only icons where the authors have explicitly approve the license change will appear there.

For me, this should mean better adoption in the BungeeConnect platform, where I maintain a set of the Tango Icons.

Here's the original post:

[Tango-artists] relicensing tango-icon-theme

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Jakub Steiner	Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 4:25 AM
To: Tango Artists List Cc: Steven Garrity , Ulisse Perusin , Rodney Dawes
Hello fellow tango artists! One of the most frequent debates here has been the licensing surrounding the tango style's first implementation, the tango-icon-theme. Licensed Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.5, it has been problematic to ship along with GPLed software and create derivative artwork for many major software projects. The licensing has created a barrier where we needed quick adoption. A lot of time has been wasted recreating the same asset in gnome-icon-theme and OpenOffice. So I'm relieved that after a _long_ debate with Novell legal and the open source review board, Novell is agreeing to relicense its share of tango-icon-theme under a more liberal license. The talk has been about CC-BY-SAv3, LGPL, but in the end the license that is the least restricting and clear wrt to artwork (as opposed to code) is giving up copyright and going Public Domain. This will allow the assets to be used in free software regardless of the projects' license as well as proprietary software. Huge thanks goes out to Michael Meeks who has been the negotiator finally managing getting this through. I've done the majority of work on tango icon theme, but there is a lot more contributors. I'd like to ask everyone to either approve or refuse their work to be relicensed to public domain. I have cc:ed people listed in the AUTHORS file. Luckily I have been mandating people to provide the authorship metadata in the SVGs themself, so we can figure this out on a per-icon basis. One negative aspect of the theme may be that people are free to claim authorship of your work. But realistically, people who do that, will do it regardless of the license (as has been seen on many occasions in the past). We can simply keep on kindly asking for people to give proper credits to the tango project and linking to the website. Suggest rather than mandate. I don't know how this applies to the autotools scripts and configurations. I would take this opportunity and suggest to start from scratch on the new 'tango-icon-theme'[1]. Create a git repository on freedesktop in place of the clumsy CVS, stop worrying about legacy (icon-naming-utils), stop depending on a build system for an icon theme, and simply use an artist-friendly workflow to edit icons in vector form. I have been very happy using a one-canvas workflow I will follow up on. Let's resurrect and scavenge the good that's left in tango icon theme! cheers [1] I actually have -- http://jimmac.musichall.cz/i.php?i=Tango-NG -- Jakub Steiner <jimmac@novell.com> Novell, Inc. _______________________________________________ Tango-artists mailing list Tango-artists@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/tango-artists