On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 2:00 AM, jdd
Hello, In the general meeting of yesterday evening we proposed to have a discussion about licencing.
Some hints:
* There are many licences in the wild : http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Accepted_licences
* as long as "art" is involved (at least I know this for photography), there is an inalienable right for the author (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary...)
That said the problems of licencing of artwork are numerous. I could lead a similar discussion for documents for the LDP that had as result this licence page http://wiki.tldp.org/LdpWikiDefaultLicence
The problems:
* artwork is often difficult to label - how can we know who is the author? (exifs for photographs, but for drawings or logos or posters or flyers?)
* there are often many authors for the same work
* we do not have enough artists in openSUSE. As we don't have money to pay for some, we have to reward them. The minimum reward is to credit them of the work.
Some solutions:
* have a document in the distro/wiki... with the artwork authors name like in news papers
* copy this document in the release notes
What kind of licence
Given we have many artworks in the distro/project, having various licences may lead to great difficulties.
A very common licence is cc-by-sa.
sa (share alike) may conflict with other licence, say GPL. If we have to make a document with both cc-by-sa artwork and gpl'ed artwork, is this allowed by the initial licence?
by (credit) may also give problems: if we make a poster with lot of logos, where can we give credit for each author?
So the best licence for the distribution is "cc" alone - with cc-by-sa with attribution of the hole result to the openSUSE project. Not sure how this agree with Berne convention.
any ideas welcome - I have no decision power on the subjet for openSUSE (nor want any). result of discussion will be sent to the artwork team and the board :-)
thanks jdd -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+owner@opensuse.org
That is a good summary of the situation. I know that in the past, when I have done artwork for companies, I have been asked to sign a release form in which I agree to give up the work I made and give it to the company. That way the company is responsible for copyright of a finalized work and I have agreed for them to do so. It seems to me a very simple and transparent idea. The thing is also that many time we create artwork that does not become official. It is not shipped with the distribution. In that case we could have CC take care of everyone's work. We could have a central place, as mentioned here, where our artwork is gathered. Once the artwork moves up and makes it into the distribution, we could sign a release form to openSUSE. This is just a thought based on what JDD just wrote here. Andy (anditosan) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+owner@opensuse.org