What happens when I include "icons" licensed under the GPL in my project?

Inspired by the icons Codergeek42 linked to in this thread, what happens if I use these in a project? Say it's a PHP script and I grab a couple of these to use for navigation? (My project uses the Affero GPL, which is similar to the GPL, anyhow.)

I'm not changing the icons, just using them. If I include the GPL license in reference to the Icons, does that cover me?

Does including them have any "viral" effects on my PHP scripts?

I'm thinking that as long as I include the GPL license and any copyright files there may be, I'm clear. Anyone think differently? I'm sure this is a common question, so I'll look around on their page some more...

---John Holmes...

Heh... who knows. He probably will move it. I fixed the link, though. Thanks.

To add to the question, though, I had a search through their mailing lists. Someone asked about the license and someone replied that "software was GPL" and that the icons were bundled with it... So are these not even licensed? Are they just copyright by their authors? I don't see any copyright information with the icons, though.

Time for an email, I think.

---John Holmes...

As the icons are digital, *I* would consider them software. However, I have recently seen themes/skins for the xoops.org project which are being sold whilst the xoops project itself is goverened by a GPL'ish license IIRC

My understanding is that if your contribution isn't easily discernible from the original GPL'd work, you're obliged to carry the original GPL.

Given that you're going with the email anyway, I'd offer a credits page to include details of the license, details of the artist, and details of the project you found them on, with 'props' I think the term is, prhaps, even props to coder

I don't think anyone really knows the answer to this. There's an interesting read here, where the creator of a GPL'd icon set* found his work on a website. Shenanigans ensued.

( * well, Jimmac - THE creator of many of the big FLOSS icons: Gnome2, GIMP, etc )

The fun thing, I think, is that if you keep the icon package together in a sub-directory, along with the license, then you use them. This means that the user can swap them in and out, and you're just distributing them by "aggregating" them (ie: not "deriving" them, just distributing at the same time, under their original licence). HOWEVER, this did not appear to be the case in the website discussion I mentioned above - apparently this all revolves around exactly what you (or more realistically, the courts) take to be a "derived work".

There's a good discussion of why the GPL is bad for artwork here.

In short - check if the licence you want to use is GPL compliant, if it is, then you should be fine. If it ISN'T, then I'd poke around sourceforge or kde-look.org for Creative Commons / Artistic Lic. / BSD licensed icons.

--Simon

Business Help is for discussion of copyright issues and whatnot. Moved from the Lounge.

I don't think the Affero GPL is compatible with the FSF's GNU GPL is it? (It adds another restriction to the redistribution permissions.) Debian has a great legal advice mailing list. Perhaps you'd want to ask them about this?

Thanks. I sent an email off to the Project Maintainer, so I'll wait a few days for a response.

Great. Let us know how it turns out.

jibble said


It looks like you can license your software in a number of ways

Who's talking about software? We're discussing images/icons, etc. Artwork. whatever-the-hell that link is looks like a download for a zip file...

---John Holmes...