search

penpot / penpot-files

Publicly released files and assets of Penpot, The Open-Source design & prototyping platform
132 stars 43 forks source link

CC BY 4.0 and the CocoMaterial License are incompatible #3

Open 12people opened 2 years ago

12people commented 2 years ago

The CC BY 4.0 license specifically prohibits additional restrictions:

You may not offer or impose any additional or different terms or conditions on, or apply any Effective Technological Measures to, the Licensed Material if doing so restricts exercise of the Licensed Rights by any recipient of the Licensed Material.

The CocoMaterial license, however, does impose such a restriction:

This license does not include the right to compile illustrations from CocoMaterial to replicate a similar or competing service.

As such, the CocoMaterial license is not only non-free (as per the OKF's Open Definition and the Free Cultural Works definition), but also incompatible with the CC BY 4.0 license that the Cocomaterial.penpot file is licensed under. That means that this penpot library violates CocoMaterial's copyright.

niwinz commented 2 years ago

With my MR merged, we have solved all important legal issues and inconsistences. And documented the contribution policy. In any case, you are right about cocomaterial, and we are discussing internally the next steps about this file.

Thank you very much for raising this issues.

niwinz commented 2 years ago

Exposing cocomaterial icons in a penpot file, it a way to facilitate to use the cocomaterial icons, we don't create a competing service, we just facilitate the use and always point users to original web (and not an other web that competes with cocomaterial). This does not violates the last statement of cocomaterial license.

12people commented 2 years ago

@niwinz You're right — the CocoMaterial license isn't violated. However, the Creative Commons Attribution license IS violated.

In much the same way that one cannot release proprietary CC BY-NC work inside a CC BY work (see this compatibility page), one cannot release proprietary work inside CC BY work. That's simply because CC BY disallows additional restrictions, and a proprietary license necessarily puts additional restrictions on the work.

niwinz commented 2 years ago

And if you look, that cocomaterial right now is not subject by CCBY in the repository. CC BY only applies to penpot files that does not include explicit license.

12people commented 2 years ago

@niwinz Ah, okay, great, I didn't notice at first!

Would be good to copy that same LICENSE statement to the README (or get rid of the License section in the README) — as is, it's a bit misleading.

The relevant new text is this, right?

Some penpot files has third-party content (assets, images, etc.) licensed with other OpenSource licenses; in this case the content license applies (only to assets that already have their own license).

It's worth mentioning that the CocoMaterial license is not an open-source license, but a proprietary one, at least according to every open-source definition that I know of. But I guess that's neither here nor there.

The "(only to assets that already have their own license)" part is a bit confusing, as the Penpot file itself has to have a license too, and if the asset license applies only to the asset and CC BY can't apply to the file as it's incompatible, it's unclear what license the file itself would be.

Anyway, those are mostly just nitpicks — thanks for fixing this. :)

12people commented 2 years ago

BTW, in the future, it would be nice to show the license directly inside a template's card so that people would know what licensing rules to follow right away, rather than have to look up each template in the repo separately.

niwinz commented 2 years ago

@niwinz Ah, okay, great, I didn't notice at first!

Would be good to copy that same LICENSE statement to the README (or get rid of the License section in the README) We will look into it ;)

The "(only to assets that already have their own license)" part is a bit confusing, as the Penpot file itself has to have a license too, and if the asset license applies only to the asset and CC BY can't apply to the file as it's incompatible, it's unclear what license the file itself would be.

This statement does not apply to the cocomaterial case, this applies only in case you have a penpot file with some designs using your own components, but also uses some icons from material design. In this case, the file and components are licensed by the penpot file license, and the asset still licensed by the original license.

In case of cocomaterial, this is already clear, the penpot file and contents uses the same license: cocomaterial license.

It's worth mentioning that the CocoMaterial license is not an open-source license, but a proprietary one, at least according to every open-source definition that I know of. But I guess that's neither here nor there.

We are aware of it, and as I mentioned, we are discussing what to do with this. This will be solved soon (removing it or providing it with a true open source license with the author permission).

Anyway, those are mostly just nitpicks — thanks for fixing this. :)

12people commented 2 years ago

Ah, okay.

Wonderful, thank you! :)