cocoaforge

First, some history: In 2006, a user ported Tritone Symphonic to Trillian for Windows, and it was at that point I began posting a Creative Commons license on all of the soundsets I've personally composed. It has recently been pointed out to me in email that the CC licenses that I use are in conflict with the GNU GPL Adium falls under.

An excerpt from that email:

The CC license you have placed on your work... conflicts with the Freedom of Distribution clause of the GNU GPL, and by doing so you are legally liable for placing a copyright on work that is permitted to be freely distributed and modified in the first place. By submitting an xtra to Adium or any other open-source project for that matter, you agree and abide to these terms. ...I suggest that you do not place a license on any of your xtras in the future...

How does this work, exactly? I wanted to leave it open for others to freely share and remix my soundsets while still receiving credit, and I thought that since Trillian is commercial software, a CC license would be the best way to do it. (In the interest of full disclosure, I've ported a few soundsets over to Proteus as well, with the same license.) Also, the silvertheme soundset I ported over from KDE/GNOME was licensed under a CC license; is that in violation of KDE's/GNOME's GPL?

N.B.: I am a musician, not a lawyer. That doesn't mean you have to use small words, but... plain English would be helpful. Thanks

Who sent you this email?

I don't believe the author is correct. You can distribute your artwork / composition under any license you choose. In this case, the creative commons license is what you chose, and anyone utilizing your work must abide by that license.

Content on adiumxtras.com is not distributed with Adium and so is not directly connected to Adium's license. If we (the Adium team) were to want to include a particular xtra in Adium itself (as we've done several times in the past), we would contact its author and request relicensing by that author under the GPL for compatibility with Adium. I'm not a lawyer either and am not sure that this is even necessary for non-code components of the program -- I think 'works of art' can be included as CC within a GPL program, but I'm not sure -- so we would really do this just for simplicity's sake.

An author may always relicense or dual-license his/her work, as regardless of license he/she retains copyright over the work.

Does that clear things up?

PM sent—thanks for the clarification.

It's a separate work imho. The only type of thing that would fall under this would perhaps be a plugin that's compiled using gpl source, but we've not enforced that on one or two occasions because that doesn't help us with what we're trying to do with the Xtras site, in general.