clicompanion-devs team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 12/11/2011 05:20 PM, Jonathan Marsden wrote:

> There might be a way for him to embed a copyright string and licence 
> notice inside the original SVG file, and for those to be retained
> when it is converted in the build process to PNG or whatever other
> binary formats we need.  That approach might be worth a look, if the
> GPG key problem is going to take a while to sort out.


The metadata element in the SVG file at


https://bugs.launchpad.net/clicompanion/+bug/608653/+attachment/1463903/+files/CLIcompanion.svg

does not appear to have any authorship, copyright, or licence info; it
might be a really good idea to fix that.

I just realized something else -- the current clicompanion build process
does not seem to use the original .svg file, it just has some derived
.png files in the source file tree.  This is, I think, technically a
breach of the GPL, since GPL requires that source files are provided in
the "preferred form":


> The "source code" for a work means the preferred form of the work
> for making modifications to it.

That would be SVG in the case of these graphics, since it is far more
readily edited and transformed that raster image formats like PNG, which
are at a specific resolution and so have lost information compared to
the original vector based image.  So, as I understand it, the SVG file
should be in the clicompanion source tarball, and the clicompanion build
process needs to convert that into the PNG file or files that are used
at runtime.

Indeed, I had assumed that was what was currently being done, until I
checked just now.

Your DD friend should be able to advise you/us in detail on these kinds
of issues; it is a bit odd to me that he has apparently not helped you
work through all the copyright/licencing stuff in depth yet, since that
is almost always the really hard part of getting new software packaged
for Debian.  The technical stuff involved in packaging is usually
relatively straightforward; the legal part is often hard and time-consuming!

Jonathan