Re: Icon designer wanted (Aquamacs Emacs)

[David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com>]

> > However, the big advantage for us is that we can draw from icons
> > used in a variety of other projects. So much of the core work is
> > done -- what remains is to find and select the right icons, make
> > them look uniform / coherent, draw remaining ones.
>
> It seems a bit out of place to do this work downstream when it seems
> more sensible to do this in Emacs itself.
> ...
> Is there a reason why you don't want to work on improving the icons in
> Emacs proper?
I'm glad you see it that way, and we certainly would be delighted to  
make source code (or icons) available to the main Emacs. Quite a few  
patches developed for Aquamacs have already been applied and a  
package has been added, others might be in the future. Of course,  
this applies to icon designs as well.

However, the rigorous legal process involved in contributing material  
to Emacs means that we cannot just take somebody else's icons from  
GPL'd software, properly credit them and make use of their work in  
the spirit of free software. While I perfectly understand why this  
may be considered necessary for GNU software, given the history of  
Emacs, I don't see myself or anyone come up with a newly drawn set of  
icons of high quality. Instead, we need to reuse icons. Therefore, if  
someone is willing to do the work, I'd incorporate this in our  
distribution now. If the Emacs team is then willing to go through a  
discussion process as to whether to adopt a new UI, and if the FSF  
would do some legal footwork, I'd be proud to support them. But that  
is up to them, not me, to ask, "Hey, can we incorporate that?".

But before that, we'll need to do the work and I prefer doing that  
before offering a contribution. The extensive work of the Carbon  
port, e.g. was done in the same way, and the Nextstep port is under  
way in a very similar fashion.

Again, I would need a dedicated graphics person with the time to  
assemble a coherent set of icons.