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Comment by damian2000 | Hacker News Reader

damian2000

I've got another less exciting reason how it ended up there... someone at Sony or one of their contractors found it on here:

http://www.iconarchive.com/show/oxygen-icons-by-oxygen-icons...

It says there "commercial usage allowed". They probably didn't even know it was from KDE.

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Yes, commercial use is allowed, but the LGPL requires attribution. The site you give does link prominently to the LGPL license.

> Yes, commercial use is allowed, but the LGPL requires attribution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_Licen...

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html

Where does it say that, I can't find the word attribution on there?

Do you maybe mean the creative commons license?

I think the OP may have been referring to 4a:

    a) Give prominent notice with each copy of the Combined Work that the Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by this License.

These sites don't.

http://www.tineye.com/search/20fd99e0d87a8d04e30b5c307d81b49...

This seems to be an image search site like google images. It does find the same icon on toshiba.com: http://us.toshiba.com/computers/accessories

This icon seems to be very popular indeed...

It doesn't fit on that Toshiba page at all! Everything is dark and then bam white and yellow!

What if I go to some site, that offers me movies for free and states "commercial usage allowed" ?

Public domain and freely available artwork is commonly available on the internet. Free movies are not. One of those seems more likely to be valid than the other.

And in any case, Sony can use this artwork commercially. It's free software, for goodness sake. What they missed was the requirement for attribution. So they should provide that somewhere. End of story.

I don't understand this kind of logic. I mean, I can see the hypocrisy argument -- Sony is a Big Evil Corporation and constantly harping about IP rights, and here they got caught not-quite-following-the-letter-of-the-licesense.

But come on now: the KDE team drew and released those icons (and the rest of their software) with the clear intent that they would be useful to people in their own work. They even licensed it to allow that. This isn't a great crime, it's just a mistake.

I honestly think we should be pretty strict about following licenses to the letter. No-one who creates open-source software has the time to hand-hold all their users and make sure they are in compliance, so we should help them out.

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