Mageia desktop background causes foreground headache

The new Mageia default desktop, courtesy of pr09studio. The Mageia developers are replacing the background image in Mageia 2 after discovering that they did not have permission to include it. Mageia 2 was released just over a week ago. The current background image, which won the Mageia 2 artwork contest, was submitted by a user who had derived it from an original work by pr09studio. The Mageia community were made aware of the use of the Domination wallpaper early on the morning on 31 May and, after confirming that it was derivative, set about remedying the problem.

By the afternoon of the same day, the Mageia developers had arranged to replace the background image with a version by pr09studio. Pr09studio has also relicensed both his own version and the derivative for use by Mageia, allowing users who installed from the original Mageia 2 ISOs to not be in breach of his copyright. ISOs for Mageia are being rebuilt and the credits updated; the change will also be reflected in Cauldron updates.

Although the original contest announcement made it clear that submissions should be CC-by-SA 3.0 licensed and not contain copyrighted artwork, the Mageia team are using the incident as a learning experience. "In the future, we will be more cautious when validating the licence of the submissions" say the distribution's developers. They plan to be "asking for a more formal public statement about authorship and licence, checking and publishing all source files used to create the image" to ensure that.

(djwm)