Radio Userland uses, right out of the box, the icon for the <%radio.macros.mailto ()%> macro. This icon was developed by Michael Herrick of Matterform Media back in the 90's. He made it available as a free icon for web development with the only caveat being that a link to his site be included as proper credit for its use.
When I first installed Radio I immediately noticed the icon and absently assumed that Dave and the folks at Userland had licensed the icon as some kind of deal which alleviated the user, me, of having to link to Matterform. I promptly removed the icon itself from all my templates because of 2 reasons:
- I do not at all like the mailto interface for Radio. It seems like a no brainer to me that if I were to use such a system then I should be able to easily set the template for such a page and not have a RADIO USERLAND OFFICIAL DESIGN in my readers' faces.
- I just wasn't sure about the use of an icon which I knew was not developed by Userland or Bryan Bell and which was not, apparently, licensed to Userland.
Given the recent issues surrounding Necho I was prompted recently to spend some time perusing the Radio site to get a bunch of back ground reading done on the flair ups and personalities of the Not Echo project. As a whim I typed Matterform in the search function at Userland and came back with nothing. What gives? I've dropped Michael a note to find out.
UPDATE I have confirmed with Michael and Userland does not have a license to use this icon. This leads me to believe that every .fttb file in every standard Radio install is in violation of the QBullet license. I have no idea what this means but Matterform is aware of the issue now.
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