Licensing alert: TinyMCE is not fully LGPL
Neal Gompa recently brought to my attention that the artwork used in TinyMCE – specifically, the icons – are from Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 SDK. This came from a reply we requested directly from MoxieCode (the company that develops TinyMCE). The license terms for them permits distribution, but restricts modification: the icons must remain “consistent with the permitted use of the unmodified [images].” According to Neal, MoxieCode has failed to document this licensing exception.
Not all of the icons are from Visual Studio – some of them are from Fam Fam Fam’s Silk icon set (the same icons I use pretty much everywhere in Enano), which is under the Creative Commons Attribution license (can’t remember which version). But if you use TinyMCE without a custom icon set, beware – your software includes some non-free components.
As for Enano, we’re going to look at putting together a Tango and/or Fam Fam Fam icon set and contributing it back upstream to TinyMCE. We don’t think it’s right that Microsoft’s restrictively-licensed intellectual property be included with free software like Enano. Lots of open source CMSes and blog software might be affected by this, so if you maintain any software that uses TinyMCE, be on the lookout for an update with more freely-licensed icons.
MoxieCode CTO Johan Sörlin noted in his e-mail:
What they say in the Image Library specific to the Office icons we use:
Action icons are used to represent commands in the menu structure. These are most often action verbs, but sometimes are nouns (objects or tools) with actions associated with them, such as Hide or Show. As part of a visual language, the following images (or any part of the images) should be used consistent with, although not necessarily identical to, the usage described below
This is what they say about the Image Library in general in their eula.txt:
Image Library. You may copy and distribute images and animations in the Image Library as described in the software documentation. You may also modify that content. If you modify the content, it must be for use that is consistent with the permitted use of the unmodified content.
Third Party Distribution. You may permit distributors of your programs to copy and distribute the Distributable Code as part of those programs.
Neal also noted to me their use of Firebug Lite and jQuery without documentation of their licenses (BSD and MIT respectively) – including license headers in the source code. This isn’t as serious because they can legally be relicensed, but it does raise some questions.
Update: Firebug Lite is just a bunch of prototypes and it’s about 5 lines of code, so either it’s WTFPL/public domain or Joe Hewitt’s off his nut, the latter of which I seriously doubt. jQuery of course is still MIT, but the TinyMCE folks don’t modify it so they redistribute it with its license unmodified. They have also left the headers in the source code, although you won’t see that unless you download the source archive. Perhaps you should include a 3rd party license list in the About dialog, MoxieCode?
