License confusion: "don't resell the icons" but CC-BY 4.0

[stain]

https://github.com/google/material-design-icons#license says:

The only thing we ask is that you not re-sell the icons themselves.

but the Creative Commons Attribution license says:

You are free to:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material
for any purpose, even commercially.

So if I've downloaded the icons ("the material"), then I should in theory also be allowed to share commercially those icons - at least according to your LICENSE and if I comply with the attribution requirements.

So is "we ask" in the README just a kind request rather than an additional legal requirement?

I am asking this not because I actually want to sell the icons, but because we want to use the icon in an Apache-licensed app (see apache/incubator-taverna-mobile#18), and a "do not sell" license is incompatible with the Apache License, as it would effectively making it a weak variant of Creative Commons Non-Commercial.

Adding to the confusion is also #417 which claims the license is Apache License instead of CC..

[Zizouz212]

It's just text. They don't want you to make money solely by selling their icon. But they want you to make commercial use of the icons within your own commercial software. If you use the icons in my_software.app, that's fine. They don't want you to be selling a google_material_design_icons.zip for $99.99.

The "do not sell" part is a wish. An intention. But not an actual licence. It's in no way a variant of the CC BY NC licence.

Go on and use them. CC BY 4.0, or Apache, the two of them are compatible.

Don't poison good wishes.

[aviau]

We may include some material design icons in Debian soon, and the "do not re-sell" clause would make them non-free.

Could this be clarified in the README?

[medicalwei]

I am also doing Debian packaging for a project (https://github.com/trufont/trufont) which also uses one icon from this project and I am still wondering if "do not resell" part is part of the license or not, although this project itself lists the icon as CC-BY 4.0 (probably an old license?)

[RoelN]

Please follow this PR for progress on the issue: #605