Use of Icons from a GPL'd program

Question

There is a GPL'd program that has some nice icons I would like to use in a project of my own. I would like to release my project under a more liberal license like Apache or BSD.

After reading the GPL V3 license (a few times), I can't figure out how it applies to resources like icons. Can I use them at all? If so, must I release my new project under GPL instead of some other license?

Of course, I plan to contact the original author and ask them what they had in mind and honor that intent. But what are the legal requirements for use of graphical resources from GPL'd software?

Answer 1

For legal advice you should ask a lawyer. The GPL requires that any "derivative work" of a GPLed original, or work "based on" the GPLed original, must also be distributed under the GPL. But the meanings of those terms have varying interpretations. Is a program "derived from" an icon just because it uses that icon in its UI? Or is it merely an "aggregation" of the icon being distributed together with your program? There isn't a clear answer that everyone would agree on.

At any rate, if you determine that use of GPL icons doesn't require your program to be GPLed, you still have to comply with the GPL requirements for the icons themselves, i.e. distributing the "source code". Fortunately, for an icon you probably don't have to do anything special. The GPL defines "source code" as "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it", and for an image, that's probably just the image file itself. However, if the icon was created by some means other than someone drawing/painting it in a graphics program, there might be additional data files you need to distribute.