Re: Fw: [tsc-devel] Signing-off commits on legal questions

Luiji Maryo | Sun, 08 Feb 2015 03:46:02 UTC

I'm not a lawyer, so I'm trying to avoid any discussion of what
copyright law permits from this point on, but that Chinese copyright
factoid was particularly interesting.

I believe that it is fine to put the resource works under a different
license than the executable works, primarily based off the fact that
this doesn't seem to be uncommon. See [1] which lists numerous video
games with different "engine" and "content" licenses. This includes
many examples of free engines and non-free content.

The logo can easily be protected as a trademark in a similar fashion
to Firefox, where though it is still considered free and open source
software, you'd need to change it in derivatives. At the same time,
this is part of the reason why Debian uses an unbranded Iceweasel
version and GNU maintains Icecat.

I'm unaware of a method to protect the music, however.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_games