Category talk:Screenshots of freely licensed software

Deprecation
I would really like to deprecate this category completely because it is vaguely defined in scope and so far, has had images assigned to it that don't meet the stated criteria (ones showing significant possibly non-de-minimis amounts of the Windows UI - particularly the Aero UI - cannot be freely licensed, period, and this doesn't depend on the software's license).

This category and the template that populates it confuse too many legal gray areas and philosophical borderlines between a program's source code, its output, and elements of its graphical design, all of which could be under separate licensing situations. Example: the GPLv3 compiler GCC outputs executables. Those executables are under no licensing impositions because they are a product of, not a derivative of, the software. However the programs Bison and Flex output a derivative of their own source codes. As a result, they have to have a special exception placed in their licenses to stop the GPL from being automatically imposed on the output.

When discussing whether graphical components and UI layouts fall under a program's source code license automatically, you will run into various situations where this is both defined only by case law, and is clearly defined to the contrary. A free software program with its source code licensed under GPLv2+ might for example choose to use icons that are licensed under CC BY-SA or FAL. Claiming the icons are GPL because they are aggregated with a GPL program is incorrect.

So I suggest this be phased out and, once no longer used, nominated for deletion. --Quasar (talk) 12:05, 16 October 2015 (CDT)