It has come to our attention that we have included artwork in Mageia 2 which we did not have permission to include.
We are very sorry about it – we did not know, and now that we do, we are putting it right just as fast as we can.
How?
Unfortunately we received artwork in our Mageia 2 artwork contest that the submitter had derived from an original work, that they did not have a license to use. We now realise that we need to check people’s copyright assertions more fully, and we’re working on ways to make sure we do that in future.
The Mageia 2 artwork contest clearly indicated that the proposals should be licensed under CC-By-SA, however we probably put too much trust in the people who submitted artwork for the contest, and someone submitted a background that was derived from another work.
In the future, we will be more cautious when validating the license of the submissions, asking for a more formal public statement about authorship and license, checking and publishing all source files used to create the image.
Fixing it
We have now talked with the original artist, and he has been kind enough to relicense his artwork and its derivative for use by Mageia. This means that those of us who have installed from the original Mageia 2 ISOs are not in breach of his copyright.
However, we are rebuilding the ISOs, including the Credits, to include his original artwork – which is beautiful! – and building updates to the necessary rpms. So if people download the rebuilt ISOs they will be getting the properly-licensed artwork, and if you have already installed Mageia 2, your system will be updated automatically. We will also include the updates in Cauldron.
Credit goes to pr09studio
The original artist is pr09studio, and his portfolio can be found at http://pr09studio.deviantart.com. We are very grateful to him for his understanding, and for licensing his beautiful work so we can use it.
Next
And from now on, when we are inviting people to submit artwork for inclusion in Mageia, we will be very very careful about checking that they have the rights to it!
Now feast your eyes on this…
Answer from Luiz
Here is a copy of his comment on this post to complete all this
I talked to the original artist, and I asked him apologize for the misunderstanding.
I’d like to do the same for the Mageia community, but I have no idea how I can do this.
I’ve found the background on a website, where the “artist” said he was the original creator, and I could modify the original file and I could redistriubui it again.
But that information was wrong, and I was mistaken, for he was not the true artist, and unfortunately I just found out today that the true artist is the “pr09studio” and his license does not allow what I did.
I apologize for any inconvenience caused by Mageia community, and, if possible, I’d like someone to add my words in the post above, as a way for me to apologize.
Luiz
