Dev411 Blog: Typo - License for TypoGarden Themes

Typo - License for TypoGarden Themes

John Wang — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 20:48:00 -0500

There has been some confusion about the license that covers the themes submitted to the 2005 TypoGarden Theme Contest. Many themes do not mention a specific license and the contest page simply says:

All themes submitted will be made available for download. Don’t submit it unless you want it to be used by tens of thousands of Typo users.

Geoffrey Grosenbach, of TypoGarden, mentioned on the #typo IRC channel that all the themes submitted are under the MIT License. This makes sense since Typo itself is under the MIT License.

Some contest theme authors have released their themes under different licenses, notably:

Lush by Marco van Hylckama Vlieg: This has a 2005 copyright notice and says the theme is "Licensed under the Creative Commons NC License (no commercial use)"
Lucid by Jamie Hill: There's no license file with the Lucid theme, however, Jamie mentions the theme should only be used for Typo in a blog comment: "You can use it as-is on any typo blog however I would not want to see it used for anything other than that i.e. corporate website." Jamie has been kind enough to allow me to use the Lucid theme on this site saying: "As for the licensing… strictly speaking it should only be used for blogs un-changed however I can’t see an issue with your usage as the projects you are using it for are open source (as long as the 'template by…' link stays on there)."

IMO, since there doesn't seem to be a license requirement on the theme page and I'm not sure whether the MIT License requirement was communicated to theme submitters via other channels, it seems safer to use the author specified license if it exists and the MIT License when none is specified. For future contests, specifying the submission license requirements with the rest of the rules seems best.

"Typo - License for TypoGarden Themes" by John Wang

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 14:58:07 -0500

I got around to checking out out the Creative Commons site and it seems like what you want is the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeWork license for the Lucid theme. You can generate some code for your website if you use the CC license wizard.

That being said, I think it’s nice to allow derivative works so the theme can be ported to other software while remaining non-commercial with attribution. Allowing derivative works seems more consistent with open source and may also encourage people to supply patches, for example, the IE bugs on Lucid.

"Typo - License for TypoGarden Themes" by John Wang

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:25:25 -0500

I’m not sure there’s a specific license for that but it should be pretty easy to write that up in a license-like manner. Including it in a file in the theme file would probably be a good idea.

"Typo - License for TypoGarden Themes" by Jamie Hill

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 08:27:51 -0500

I am happy for anyone to use the theme unchanged on blogs (is there a suitable license for this?)