License of W3C icons

Dear all,

A lot of open-source projects generate their documentation and API
docs using html/xml/css/mathml/svg technologies and some of the
documentation generation tools insert icons from
http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/Icons into the resulting documents.

Unfortunately that causes problems with licensing the resulting
documentation, despite being open source documentation [1]  the
ruslting document is non-free, since the above included icons appear
to be non-free and non-modifiable.

Can you please license those icons under a free license?
For example are the icons at http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/Icons covered
by W3C Software Notice and License? [2]

There is no intention to modify official W3C logos, as indeed that
would defeat the purpose and violate your trademark, but it would be
great if the logos would be opensourced such that one can use them on
the baisis of creating derivative / unrelated to W3C trademark images
etc. Debian Operating system requires all its components to be
modifiable, thus at the moment we have started to strip upstream
software distributions from W3C logos and we are intending to not ship
them on Debian.

Imho, it would be a shame to not be able to display W3C logos by
default on Debian, and I hope that you can license your logos under a
free licence, without compromising your registered trademark policy.

[1] open source defined as per https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
[2] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231

-- 
Regards,

Dimitri.

Received on Monday, 5 May 2014 08:21:29 UTC