[sldev] [VWR] Artwork licence

[Robin Cornelius]

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to bring this up here so some of the opensource Lindens can
hear as well, as this is essentially an open source question :-)

The current artwork (excluding the trademarks) is licensed under the
"Creative Commons license Attribution-Share
Alike 2.5"  There are some small issues with this license to do with
compatibility which may even cause an issue for anyone currently
distributing there own build of viewers. As the code you are
distributing is not only under the GPL but also the CC SA 2.5 which
are not fully compatible. I am not a licensing expert but i know CC SA
2.5 is regarded by Debian as "non-free"

This issue is resolved in the CC SA 3.0 license, with some subtitle
changes to compatibility, but no changes to the "spirit" of the
licence

Any chance of moving the artwork to CC SA 3.0 license to solve this
issue? Its a bit of a blocker for including in Linux distributions.
For Debian it would mean we could not place the viewer in the main
repository it would have to go into contrib with the artwork going
into non-free, this is not really desired especially as you already
have released the code as GPL and thats where all the goodies are, the
artwork is just necessary to make it run.

The other issue is with the trademark logos and name.

The licensing page is not 100% clear on this. For instance are we
allowed to use the secondlife hand logo and the name "secondlife" in
the Debian package. We are essentially using the source code as
distributed + patches to make it work or keep it running + may be
patches to make things better, as various people already do in there
homebrew viewers.

I really would like to avoid a "mozilla" situation where we have
Thunderbird and Firefox renamed "Ice dove" and "Ice weasel" (and new
logos) just because mozilla said if the code is not 100% the same you
can't use the names or logos. All this does is alienate users.

These questions have been fed through licensing at lindenlabs but i am
pretty sure that is rewritten to /dev/null by postfix. As this is a
opensource question that really affects the future of the viewer
within linux distributions I though it should be discussed here.

Regards

Robin