[webkit-dev] Web inspector images

[Timothy Hatcher]

Hi Michael,

I am looking into our options for the license of the images. Stay tuned.

— Timothy Hatcher

> On Feb 6, 2016, at 8:23 PM, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro at igalia.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
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