Licensing and legals issues are becoming increasingly important for our project. This year the Drupal Association picked up 2 board members who expressed an interest in working on legal issues. I'd like to lay down some "Dos and Don'ts" to help guide future work and make sure that existing work is on the straight and narrow:
- When you start with another piece of artwork as the base, check the license of the work you are using before you begin. If it's not stated, ask the owner and assume it is not available for re-use.
- Be sure to clearly state a license for your work. The preferred licenses are either GPL or cc-by-sa Sometimes the license you use will be determined by the license of the work you base it on. For example, our friendly Druplicon is GPL so any work that begins with the Druplicon must also be GPL.
- Note that there are earlier versions of Druplicon and completely new versions not based on the SVG version which may or may not be GPL or available to re-use. So, it is best to get the Druplicon base files from cvs.drupal.org before incorporating it into your work.
- Comply with your license. If it's GPL then you need to make the "source" available.
- Store the results somewhere on the Drupal.org infrastructure. Sadly, people's personal sites sometimes get destroyed or they leave the project. It's best if you can put it into an appropriate place in the marketing folder of the Drupal cvs repository If you need help with cvs, just ask.
What else? This is a wiki - please help out adding more advice.