On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 7:11 PM, Ricordisamoa ricordisamoa@openmailbox.org wrote:
Are there policies/guidelines regarding the use of third-party icons in software maintained on WMF's Gerrit instance (e.g. MediaWiki extensions)?
I'm unaware of any formal policies, aside from a general requirement that icons (like everything else hosted in git) be under an open license of some sort. It certainly wouldn't hurt to have that written down somewhere.
(I note that there are no icons in the git repo itself, that I can find; this does not excuse problematic licensing, but does make it slightly less urgent to resolve.)
For example, the Chameleon https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Chameleon skin appears to use Glyphicons http://glyphicons.com, whose license < http://glyphicons.com/license/%3E is not very clear.
The license looks fairly clear to me: png ("free") version is under CC; version included with bootstrap is MIT; other versions are non-free.
Has the author said things elsewhere to indicate that he(?) doesn't understand the MIT terms, or somehow believes they aren't under MIT?
Assuming Chameleon uses the icons included with Bootstrap, this looks fairly straightforward to me.
Even git.wikimedia.org https://git.wikimedia.org uses Glyphicons (the
free PNG version) without complying with the CC-BY 3.0 license.
If we're using them on git.wikimedia.org, we should probably fix that. (I see Chad says there is an upstream bug, but I can't find it for the life of me, despite looking in three different places. gitblit doesn't strike me as the most... organized project I've ever looked at.)
Wouldn't it be better to use a really /free/ icon set (such as Font-Awesome https://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/ or Elusive Icons http://shoestrap.org/downloads/elusive-icons-webfont/) instead?
As discussed above, parts of Glyphicon are CC and/or MIT, which is "really free". There may be a discussion to be had around development models, sustainability, community-friendliness, etc., and if you want to have that discussion, by all means! But please don't confuse/complicate the discussion by saying things under free licenses aren't "really free" - if you're doing that, you're using the terms in a very different way from common, long-term usage.
Hope that helps- Luis