[webkit-dev] Web inspector images

[Michael Catanzaro]

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