Hi, I'd like to address the problem with the license for the web inspector images. The background on this is that a WebKitGTK+ release was rejected by the legal department of one of our distributors after it discovered the file Source/WebInspectorUI/APPLE_IMAGES_LICENSE.rtf, which covers the images under Source/WebInspectorUI/UserInterface/Images. From a cursory glance at the license, it's clear that not only is this license not open source compatible (and therefore not compatible with the acceptable content policies of major WebKitGTK+ distributors), the images are also not distributable. I don't believe this is consistent with the values of the WebKit open source project.
In response to this issue, we created similar but freely-licensed replacement images under Source/WebInspectorUI/UserInterface/Images/gtk, took down our hosted tarballs for several previous WebKitGTK+ releases, reissued those tarballs with the images replaced, and posted a notice to alert some of our distributors to the issue. This was sufficient for our port, so we just... stopped at that. But it would be good if other ports did not have to address this problem individually, especially since there is no obvious warning when downloading WebKit as to the legal status of this content. Since the images are not usable except by Apple, it would be nice to remove these images from the public repository to reduce the risk of other ports accidentally including these image files. Therefore, I propose to simply overwrite the images under Images with the images under Images/gtk. As part of this, we would need to create a few new images that do not currently exist under Images/gtk. Also, Apple's internal build process would need to be modified to include the Apple images from elsewhere. If I am remembering correctly, I spoke to Joe Pecoraro about this at the WebKit Contributors Meeting, and he liked this idea. Would anyone object to this change? A couple alternative solutions: * Apple could relicense its images. I suspect the set of similar but freely-licensed gtk images defeats the purpose of using a restrictive license for the Apple images. This would be the best solution. Possible? * We could move the license file up from WebInspectorImages to the toplevel project directory. This would make it very difficult to accidentally distribute the Apple images without knowing the license. Michael _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev
