CleanTek

[vbgamer45]

We should probably have end of life plans. Like for me I wouldn't care and things could be recliensed, just mention name in credits somewhere. I try to make most of my mods open license BSD/MIT.

[Skhilled]

Yes, I agree but do not disagree with the team. They are only doing their job as they should.

I took a nap shortly after my last post and just woke up remembering something about, maybe, 50 years or so after a person's death that their works become free domain...or something like that. I haven't looked it up but believe that it's still true to this day.

[Skhilled]

We should probably have end of life plans. Like for me I wouldn't care and things could be recliensed, just mention name in credits somewhere. I try to make most of my mods open license BSD/MIT.

Yes, I always add in the credits that he created it and we are just updating it. If anyone helps us in any way they are also given credits.

[Arantor]

0 years or so after a person's death

Depends on the country. In the US this is 70 years after the author's death.

[Skhilled]

I knew it was something like that...

[Dave J]

So correct me if I'm wrong and I know you will

In this instance where we are creating 2.1.4 themes that look like some that Crip created originally, if we renamed them and and used a license as per Skhilled's comments is that allowed?

And if it was acceptable how different would the new name have to be? For instance we are just starting on Crip's Blue Moonshine but if we called it Moonshine Blue is that OK or would it need to be totally different?

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Well, recreating an old theme for a new version of SMF, preferably from scratch, and avoiding making it simply a 1:1 copy - give it something of your own, and just call it a theme "inspired by" the original instead of keeping the same name, could perhaps be seen as an acceptable compromise - but at this point I am not prepared to give you any actual promises of how the team might approach something like that. So far, I have only explained what the team has decided on in the past.

[Dave J]

Thanks for the reply Lex.

It seems to me that it can't be a 1 to 1 copy as the code from 2.0 to 2.1.4 is totally different, so therefore although the themes we create have a resemblance to Crips theme they are really new works with new code. I would be interested to see what others think on this.

Let's face it Heinz tomato sauce 'Ketchup' is copyright but anyone can actually and have created their own versions and still called it tomato sauce 'Ketchup', I'm sure there are other analogies but that came into my head first

[Arantor]

Where it gets murky is in the direct reuse of things.

For the most part, you'd not reuse any code because you'd leverage 2.1's instead. But any code reuse would be problematic unless it's something so generic that it doesn't matter, or literally can't be done any other way. Much CSS falls into these two camps in practice.

Images on the other hand... If you were to use images that were in Crip's themes, this is of course problematic. But if you were to make new images, or even do things in CSS rather than use images, I can't see how there would be a problem even if the design looked very close to the original. I'd probably avoid looking pixel perfect but design for modern devices with sizes and spacing and responsiveness would probably push you to do that anyway.

[Dave J]

Thanks very much Arantor

[Skhilled]

Yes, you make a good point about the images.