I've been trying to find icons to use with advanced forum and was complaining on IRC that a lot of the ones I'm finding are LGPL or CC and not GPL. Now I know CC isn't compatable but Crell was saying that LGPL is and told me to file an issue. So the question is, can we use LGPL icons in modules hosted here?

Thanks,

Michelle

Comments

oadaeh’s picture

oadaeh commented

According to http://drupal.org/node/66113, d.o doesn't host GPL-"compatible" licensed code, which, according to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses, includes LGPL.

merlinofchaos’s picture

merlinofchaos commented

Icons are not code, however.

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

Yep, not code. Also, if I was understanding Crell correctly, and it's quite possibly I wasn't since licensing confuses the heck out of me, is that he was saying that we can put LGPL icons in there with the GPL license that the icons become GPL and that's ok if they started out LGPL.

Personally, I wish the rule was changed for icons since it's very hard to find icons that aren't CC but that's a different battle. :)

Michelle

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

we don't host non-GPL stuff no matter if they are code or not. You can relicense LGPL stuff as GPL or you can just link to some icons that your users can download.

greggles’s picture

greggles
he/him
Primary language English
Location Denver, Colorado, USA
commented

Yeah, my take on this is a combination of what a couple people have said:

LGPL can be relicensed to GPL. So, when these icons are committed they would become GPL which is fine.

We also say that code/images shouldn't be readily available from another location. I believe the reasons for this is that we don't want cvs.drupal.org to have outdated versions of code and to reduce repository bloat.

Since Michelle is only going to use a few images from a much larger collection there is no good way for her to instruct users to download those specific icons. Additionally, there are just a few files which limits the bloating and it's hard for images to go "out of date" or get a security hole.

So, I believe these image files could be committed to cvs.drupal.org and that it remains consistent with our practices to date.

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented
Status: Active » Fixed

Thanks for the answers folks. That helps a lot. LGPL seems much more common than GPL. If you can just relicense, I'm not sure I get the point of LGPL but that's off topic... Maybe someone can explain on IRC some time. :)

Michelle

Crell’s picture

Crell commented

Clarification: LGPL allows usage with GPL code as well as, in some circumstances, proprietary code. It is, as far as I am aware, legal for us to redistribute something under the LGPL using the GPL, so the "everything that comes out of here is GPL" policy for CVS does not conflict and it would be permitted for us to do so. So "you can just relicense..." is true; you can do so by checking it into CVS.

Whether or not we choose to do so I leave up to the infra team.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented
Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for two weeks with no activity.

Component: CVS » Other