Viral license question-- Can non-FLOSS projects/apps use these icons? about material-design-icons HOT 11 CLOSED

Good question. The usual answer to any licensing questions on Google open-source projects is "let's check with legal", so I shall go ahead and do that :) My understanding is that the entire app does not need to be CC-SA-BY, but will get a firm confirmation for you.

from material-design-icons.

Thanks! Looks like the polymer icons are BSD-licensed, at least that's what it says in the headers... thanks for looking into it! Also, is the missing ldpi drawable directories deliberate? (Works for me, but noticed they weren't in the .zip) Thx again

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'consider re-licensing without the viral "Share-Alike" requirement because I've seen it lead to confusion'

+1 to that. And attribution is also too much hassle really. Whenever I'm looking for an icon for a project, I'll typically be doing a just a quick search trying to save myself a bit of time. I'll skip over any icon which is anything other than pubic domain, because frankly I could draw the icon myself in 15 minutes. I would rather do that than comply with (or figure how to comply with) sharealike or attribution.

I guess it's a tricky one because collectively the icons represent a lot of work, but ...well that's my perspective having often used icons for things

from material-design-icons.

<img src="icon.png"> <!-- Material Design icon by Google. Released under CC-Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. -->

Would you consider an HTML comment like this to be sufficient attribution? If I'm just using one or two icons from this set, putting an attribution notice on the page will probably take up more space than the icon itself.

from material-design-icons.

Two weeks later, any response from legal? Any chance of co-releasing under the same BSD-ish licence as the polymer core icons (which share a good proportion, but not all, of these icons)?

Or a clarification/statement that the viral nature of "remix", "transform", etc. only refers and applies to the original icons themselves and not any app that uses them (or screenshot of said app)?

from material-design-icons.

I expect to be able to address this soon. Stay tuned.

from material-design-icons.

Just saw the check-in -- new license CC-BY! Wonderful news, thanks! Please close this issue whenever you like. And thanks again for being so responsive.

from material-design-icons.

Glad to see you already noticed it :)

We originally licensed these icons under CC-BY-SA because we wanted to make them available to you to incorporate into your apps, but we didn't want someone to be able to package them up and resell them as an icon set. We heard your concerns about the scope of the share alike obligation. Our primary goal here is to make it easy for you to use the icons, so we've changed the license to CC-BY.

And we know it's not always feasible to put a copyright notice on every screen that features icons. So for this icon set, it's fine by us to put the attribution on your app's "about" page, or somewhere similar.

Feel free to reopen if you have other questions about licensing.

Cheers!

from material-design-icons.

@jestelle ,

hi, i would like to pick up @DawnPaladin s question again:

Would you consider an HTML comment like this to be sufficient attribution? If I'm just using one or two icons from this set, putting an attribution notice on the page will probably take up more space than the icon itself.

Would it be enought, to put for some icons the legal notice into the markup as comment?
we would be glad if we would not have to add a new page for this kind of information. if a user is interested in the information, he can access it.

best regards

edit: look at css-stylesheets for example - not every lib does render a box with content "Hi, this page uses stylesheets from xyz" ;D
They just put a comment into the source code.

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@jestelle could you please give an answer @DawnPaladin s question? I would love to use material design icons, but i have to know if it is enough to put the by-annotation as an comment into the markup. please consider my last post-edit.

from material-design-icons.

@stefan-niedermann We'd prefer it is a user-visible attribution, but like I said, we don't mind it hidden away on some general about page or the like.

You're probably better off for performance reasons not including extra non-rendering comments in all your HTML, unnecessarily bloating the size of your page.

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