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Licensing of Themes/Skins/Templates

1 Mar 08, 2009 05:34    

My b2evolution Version: Not Entered

I have a question, and I hope people will share their opinion or knowledge or experience or point-of-view in this matter (a sensitive one which can lead to a debate).

Personally, I don't really care since I'm just porting themes to b2evo, not really creating a new one, but I'm interested with "Licenses" specially when it comes to FLOSS-CC.

The two most common Theme/Skin/Template license I see around are GPL and CC - to be more specific = GPLv2; GPLv3; CC By-SA 3.0; CC By-NC-SA 3.0; CC By 3.0; and CC By-NC 3.0.

Now when we talk about GPL, it only licenses "codes", then the question arises - are (X)HTML and CSS codes considered as "codes" under the GPL, or are "scripts" the only ones that falls under the definition?

Then if we talk about Creative Commons, it is for artistic works - like Photos, Books, Poems, etc. Does a theme/skin/template's "layout" considered an "artistic work"?

What is b2evolution's stand on this? Are themes/skins/templates for b2evo must be or automatically becomes GPL?

I'm raising these questions, again just out-of-curiosity. I've read many debates about this matter, and read the GPL and CC Licenses time and again. But I myself can not come up with a clear distinction between the two when it comes to the topic of "Licensing of Themes/Skins/Templates".

What I do know is that, if a theme/skin/template is licensed as GPL, then the end-user can remove all "attribution" if s/he so wishes, because GPL is concerned about the code.

But if it's CC, then it requires attribution. Although the question above still arises - are layouts the concern of CC? Because if it isn't, then the end-user can still remove all attribution if s/he so wishes.

Anyway... ^_^ time to start porting a new theme to b2evo v3.1-alpha :p

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2 Mar 08, 2009 16:01

Laibcoms wrote:

...
Then if we talk about Creative Commons, it is for artistic works - like Photos, Books, Poems, etc. Does a theme/skin/template's "layout" considered an "artistic work"?
...

Actually your skin is a creative work, as is the text of your blog post. Both of these are easily considered artistic works too right? But CC is all about creative works and they most certainly do count as such according to licensing terms. How that ties in with any other aspect of licensing is a mystery to me though. When I tried porting skins, which I suck at, I figured if they were open source and said I could use them as long as {{reasonable conditions}} I figured all was well. Anyway yeah anything you create is your artistic creation so you can (should?) slap a creative commons license on it.

EDIT: Oh on porting a skin you're creating a derivative. Nobody that is offering skins to port will license with "no derivatives" but hey you created the new thing right? So hell yes you get to license it as you see fit.

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3 Mar 08, 2009 16:09

EdB wrote:

Laibcoms wrote:

...
Then if we talk about Creative Commons, it is for artistic works - like Photos, Books, Poems, etc. Does a theme/skin/template's "layout" considered an "artistic work"?
...

Actually your skin is a creative work, as is the text of your blog post. Both of these are easily considered artistic works too right?

CC asked me to stop taking the piss and remove their licence from my skin :'(

back on topic ...

Most of the stuff I release is code, and I normally pick GPL because it's an easy copy paste. In reality though, I consider all code I upload pretty much the same as every other bytes I transmit over the internet it's DWTFYWWIYWA licenced ( Do What The Fuck You Want With It. You Will Anyway ). Seems to work so far ;)

¥

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