Karine &,

Short answer: Yes, you can use the icons. 

Longer answer: Good question! The icons are published without any license 
notice, so it is impossible to know for you and others whether they are 
licensed. This is just an omission from our part...

Technically, there are two possible conclusions to this situation.
- 1 Everybody distributing the icons is violating copyright laws.
- 2 All KDE is published under open licenses, this is widely know, so, it is 
no violation of copyright laws to distribute the icons, it is just a 
situation where artists too should get there act together, make it clear 
what the actual license is. 

Conclusion 2 is more convincing.

The license used to be the LGPL. Then there was a change to something else, 
more broken than not, then there was a concept with a huge hole in it. After 
that became clear, all discussion stopped. In all cases it was explicitly 
meant to license others to freely use the icons. 

To be on the safe side: just use the icons, acknowledge the copyright 
somewhere on the website. 

Cordialemente,

Ante






On Friday 14 June 2002 16:11, Karine ZUERCHER wrote:
> Miss, Mister,
>
> Following the advice of Matthias Kalle Dalheimer (c.f. Forwarded Message at
> the bottom of this message), we would like to rise the following issue:
>
> We are currently working on a project of environmental portals for UNEP
> (United Nations Environment Programme) and would like to use some of the
> icons provided by KDE (as we are developing and using Linux stations with
> KDE with pleasure).
>
> As the KDE is 'Open Source', we assume that we can use the icons freely
> and without explicit permission.
>
> Nevertheless, we would like to ask your approval for using these icons.
>
> A draft of one of the portals can currently be consulted at
> http://193.247.37.185/europe/  .
>
> Waiting for an answer yours we hope positive,
>     we send you our best regards
>
> Karine ZUERCHER
>
> ----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
> Subject: Re: Using KDE icons
> Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 15:58:39 +0200
> From: Matthias Kalle Dalheimer <kalle@klaralvdalens-datakonsult.se>
> To: Karine ZUERCHER <karine.zuercher@grid.unep.ch>, kalle@kde.org
> Cc: "Jaap VAN WOERDEN" <woerden@grid.unep.ch>
>
> On Friday 14 June 2002 15.38, Karine ZUERCHER wrote:
> > Miss, Mister,
> >
> > We are currently working on a project of environmental portals for UNEP
> > (United Nations Environment Programme) and would like to use some of the
> > icons provided by KDE (as we are developing and using Linux stations with
> > KDE with pleasure).
> >
> > As the KDE is 'Open Source', we assume that we can use the icons freely
> > and without explicit permission.
> >
> > Nevertheless, we would like to ask your approval for using these icons.
> >
> > A draft of one of the portals can currently be consulted at
> > http://193.247.37.185/europe/  .
> >
> > Waiting for an answer yours we hope positive,
> >    we send you our best regards
>
> If whatever you do with the icons is open source as well, there shouldn't
> be any problem. However, I would suggest that you contact our artist group
> that is responsible for the icons at kde-artists@kde.org.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Kalle Dalheimer

-- 



******

http://home.uwnet.nl/~vita


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