Bug 2283321

Summary: Breeze icon theme uses copyrighted icons without acknowledgement or compliance with the owners' guidelines
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Adam Williamson <awilliam>
Component: breeze-icon-themeAssignee: Neal Gompa <ngompa13>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: urgent Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 42CC: kde-sig, ngompa13
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: If docs needed, set a value
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: Type: Bug
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On:    
Bug Blocks: 182235    

Description Adam Williamson 2024-05-26 16:13:28 UTC 
This is a downstream clone of https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=487595 . As we are distributing the Breeze icon theme, we are equally subject to any copyright issues in it.

As described there, the Breeze icon theme's license is claimed to be LGPL without exception, but in fact it contains several icons that are identical to or derived from upstream icons owned by large corporations, which are definitely not under the GPL (e.g. Skype/Microsoft, Facebook and Google):

[adamw@xps13a os-autoinst-distri-fedora (main %)]$ sudo dnf repoquery -l breeze-icon-theme | egrep -i "(facebook|skype|google)"
/usr/share/icons/breeze-dark/actions/16/im-facebook-symbolic.svg
/usr/share/icons/breeze-dark/actions/16/im-facebook.svg
/usr/share/icons/breeze-dark/actions/16/im-skype-symbolic.svg
/usr/share/icons/breeze-dark/actions/16/im-skype.svg
/usr/share/icons/breeze-dark/actions/22/im-facebook-symbolic.svg
/usr/share/icons/breeze-dark/actions/22/im-facebook.svg
/usr/share/icons/breeze-dark/actions/22/im-google-symbolic.svg
/usr/share/icons/breeze-dark/actions/22/im-google-talk-symbolic.svg
/usr/share/icons/breeze-dark/actions/22/im-google-talk.svg
/usr/share/icons/breeze-dark/actions/22/im-google.svg
/usr/share/icons/breeze-dark/actions/22/im-skype-symbolic.svg
/usr/share/icons/breeze-dark/actions/22/im-skype.svg
/usr/share/icons/breeze-dark/actions/24/im-facebook.svg
/usr/share/icons/breeze-dark/actions/24/im-google-talk.svg
/usr/share/icons/breeze-dark/actions/24/im-skype.svg
...

if you examine these icons you will see they are identical to or derived from their official icons, they are not original creations. The Skype and Facebook icons also violate their owners' branding requirements, as outlined in the upstream issue.

We do not strip these icons downstream, or even correct the licensing information.
Comment 1 Aoife Moloney 2025-02-26 13:03:11 UTC 
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora Linux 42 development cycle.
Changing version to 42.