possible license violations of themes

[Jan200101]

I went through the whole license tree while packaging Ghostty and noticed that some themes have no license available while others prohibit redistribution entirely.

Monokai Pro as one example:[1]

Monokai Pro may not be sub-licensed, resold, or redistributed.

AdventureTime as another: zdj/themes#2

None of the licenses were documented when the themes were added and only a few theme files contain license information so impossible to tell how many of the 400+ theme files are not redistributable in distros.

[Jan200101]

I went ahead and created a google sheet with all the themes and licenses I could find sheet.

Here is the rough breakdown at this point:

• 225 (50.79%) themes have a "Bad" License
  • 18 (4.06%) Themes are nonfree
    • 8 of those are from Monokai Pro which is a commercial theme sold for money which forbids redistribution in their license
    • 9 Themes are copied directly from the built-in Mac Terminal
    • 1 Theme is based on a theme from the built-in Mac terminal
  • 207 (46.73%) Themes have no license or have no clear license
    • a majority of those are themes provided by end-users or theme creators directly
    • lots of themes were imported from third party sources that either provided no license either, were never properly documented or no longer exist
    • some themes claims to be under one license but are copies from themes that have no license
    • some can be found licensed under a permissive open source license but are directly tied to a brand which makes the trademark situation complex.
    • At least one case of someone licensing their theme as "GPL" without specifying which or even providing a proper link to it.
• 218 (49.21%) themes have "Good" Licenses
  • This includes any license included in SPDX and "Public Domain"

Statistics

#	Statistics	Count		Total Percentage
1	Checked Licenses	443		100.00%
2	Unknown License	207		46.73%
3	No License	0	Projects with no license may also be marked as Unknown for the time being	0.00%
4	Nonfree License	18		4.06%
5	Licenses Todo	0		0.00%
6	Total Schemes	443		100.00%
7	Bad Licenses (Unknown, None, Nonfree)	225		50.79%
8	Good Licenses	218		49.21%

I'm concerned mainly in regards to distribution and while I doubt that Apple or any other group that had their themes taken is doing to send a DMCA because of a theme I'm also not very lucky when gambling.

Kitty (which does not use this repo but has a similar repo with similar license concerns) mainly downloads themes at runtime, which removes the burden when distributing, but does not otherwise concern itself with the topic kovidgoyal/kitty-themes#160

Ghostty pulls in themes during compilation and now received an option to disable it ghostty-org/ghostty#9288

Foot seems to contain a more curated list of themes however it still seems to ship suspect themes.

[mbadolato]

Thanks very much for doing this research

Next moves will have to be determined. Suggestions welcome (from everyone)

[pluiedev]

IMO there's no solution that will please everyone here. If we do nothing, then we continue to place potential legal risk on packagers who are responsible for the eventual redistribution. If we decide to remove the offending themes, people will inevitably ask why their favorite themes are gone, and they usually do not take it kindly if it's for some weird legal or technical reason that does not appear reasonable to the average person (i.e. the "it's just a bunch of colors" argument).

You could work around it by either asking people to download themes themselves, which is annoying for everyone involved no matter how simplified the process is, or let the user shoulder the legal responsibility for downloading a proprietary theme.

That is, of course, assuming that these legal questions are even valid to begin with, and IIRC Mitchell is already seeking legal counsel on that matter¹. For now I think we should just remove the clearly offending themes (e.g. Monokai) and keep the ones in the gray area, to minimize disruption for everyone else.

Footnotes

1. IANAL, but it feels like there's got to be something in either copyright or patent law that disallows copyrighting simple, universal concepts like a set of colors. Maybe the "Monokai" name itself is a protected trademark (I haven't looked it up myself), and we could work around that by renaming it to something legally distinct. ↩

[mbadolato]

and we could work around that by renaming it to something legally distinct

We could start Spirit Halloweening them like "Not in Stero Kai" 😆