License Question

[Ste-]

A few of the themes on the old theme wiki have the following # Released to the Public Domain March 12th 2006" and other such comments relating to their license. now are we able to update these and post to the theme site thus rendering the new work under the license Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Or shoud we leave them as are and just update those with clear licenses.

Thanks.
Stephen.

[AlexP]

Public domain is an interesting concept, as in many countries it doesn't actually exist - it is impossible to release something to the public domain.

However, in general yes - anything in the public domain (whatever it means) can be done with as you will.

Not a lawyer etc. etc.

[Ste-]

Thanks AlexP

[Ste-]

I apologise for dragging this thread up but i feel that some of the themes of the theme site have wrongly been deleted.

The H300 theme ArboWidgets theme based on http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/WpsIriverH300#arboxWidgets was licensed on March 2008
and was then ported to ipod nano on the July 2008 under a similar but not the same license http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/WpsIpodNano#arboxWidgets
should the nano port not have been allowed as some of my themes have been deleted from the theme site under similar circumstances.

My updated themes email states -nc as the reason with no contact name or anything just to come to irc or the forums, noone on irc knew anything about it so i take my problem here.
the nano port licensed wrongly i believe or maybe the original h300 theme not allowing ports in the same license was wrong ?

Either way, the email should have who removed the theme and state more information than just -nc and a small reason as the creative commons licences do look alike. it took me a few minutes to deduce why they had been removed in the first place.

[Llorean]

The iPod Video and Nano ports do not have the -NC clause. The H300 port does. All three ports were made by the original author, so he can pick the license for each independently.

You, not being the original author, cannot change the license unless the license explicitly states you can (it does not).

The theme site does not allow the -NC version of the license.

Thus, the H300 version cannot be posted unless the original author re-licenses that theme.

I don't know what the content of the email you received was, but it's really not the responsibility of the person emailing you to have to research the history of the theme. If you post a theme with an incompatible license (such as the -NC version) they're just going to note what's wrong and list that as the reason it was removed. They aren't going to research why you made that mistake or anything else.

[mc2739]

This issue was discussed in the #rockbox IRC channel.  You can read the logs of the discussion here: http://www.rockbox.org/irc/log-20091223#15:00:02

[Ste-]

Ok I can see the difference in the licenses now and in future i will completely check the license before uploading any more themes.
Thanks for the clarification Llorean.
and mc2739 for pointing me to the irc discussion.

{edit} having reviewed my previous uploaded theme the following in the X5 theme page need to be removed for same reason, OldSchoolLCD, Free-State and D2.
From what I can see they have -nc clause in their license also.
Sorry for any inconvenience caused on my part.

[AlexP]

I deleted them, for the reasons that hopefully are now clear.  I'm sorry the original e-mail wasn't clear, but for the record it was somewhat more detailed than:

just -nc

I have now removed the other offending ones too.  I didn't know the theme site didn't tell you who had deleted them, next time I'll explicitly say it was me.