Re: [gNewSense-art] Re-Licensing Artwork.

[Sam Geeraerts]

al3xu5 / dotcommon wrote:
> Having said that I am not a professional expert on licensing, although I have
> a reasonable knowledge base, my argument is: 
> - FDL has been designed for documentation [1] (preamble)
> - FDL and CC BY-SA are incompatible [2]

Brett says that both licenses want to cover everything, because of their 
copyleft nature. However, I found today that Wikipedia considers images 
to be aggregated with the text [1]. That view makes it possible for both 
to have incompatible licenses, as far as I know. If that's also true for 
our case, then there's no problem after all.

On the other hand, Wikipedia is a bad example because its text is dual 
licensed under GFDL and CC-BY-SA instead of GFDL only, images under 
either license are less problematic. And whether or not an image is 
aggregated probably depends on how tightly it's integrated with the 
text. If the text says "as you can see in the top left corner" then it's 
harder to separate the image than when it merely serves as an example or 
illustration.

> - since now all GNS artwork has been licensed as CC BY-SA

For completeness I'll add that some artwork has a different license. 
E.g. the gNewSense logo at the top of the website falls under GPLv2.

> - artwork to be used within the GNS operating system (logos, wallpapers,
>   themes, icons, buttons etc.) could (should I think) *remain* licensed as CC
>   BY-SA

I agree that it's more suitable for artwork.

> - artwork (images, videos etc.) inserted into the GNS's wiki pages should have
>   a license compatible with FDL: this can be achieved (as far as I know) asking
>   contributors to re-license to FDL or to dual-licensing adding FDL to the CC
>   BY-SA

Dual licensing is better, because that's the most flexible. Artists who 
agreed with rsiddharth's query are ok with both CC-BY-SA and GFDL for 
their artwork, so I think it's safe to assume they're ok with dual 
licensing.

> Defining more closely what is my suggestion, I think the best thing to do is:
> - ask those (which shold be the copyright holders) who have included artwork
>   (images, videos etc.) in the pages of the GNS's wiki to re-license it to FDL
>   or dual-licensing adding FDL to the CC BY-SA 
> - then "move" the entire contents of the GNS's wiki/documentation to FDL
> - and, at the same time, change the license statement in the footer (*)
>
> (*) the footer could say something like:
> "Unless otherwise specified, all contents in this site (textual, graphics,
> audio and video) are covered by the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
> License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software
> Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover
> Texts. By contributing to this website you agree to release any material under
> the same license terms."

That's the plan. Unless we can claim aggregation. In that case we should 
find a way to easily add and view license information of images on the wiki.

[1] 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verbatim_copying_under_the_GFDL#Images