Dear Tom,
Thanks for considering the Octave website design for your software project as well. Regarding the licensing issue, the website follows the convention of the Free Software Foundation [1], where all pages are licensed under the CC BY-ND. See at the bottom of each page for an explanation.
To my understanding the licence refers to the content of the page and the Octave website design, mostly the connection to existing free/libre CSS- and JS-frameworks, is published under the terms of the GPLv3 [2]. Alex, the original author of the new website design did not use special license for his original work [3]. Maybe a separate LICENSE file in the current working repository [4] would state this intention clearer.
Thus if neither Alex nor John protest, you should feel free to make use of Alex's work to improve your website.
Best regards,
Kai
[3]
https://github.com/alexkrolick/octave-web[4]
https://hg.octave.org/web-octave/Hello, my name is Tom Henderson and I am lead maintainer of the ns-3 simulator project (https://www.nsnam.org), also a GPL project. We would like to replace our Wordpress site with something more modern and mobile-responsive, and in looking around at other scientific computing projects, the site theme for Octave resonated with us.
I noticed that the Octave web sources are maintained online with at CC-SA No-Derivatives license and was wondering whether the license pertained to site content and underlying theme or just the content? I would conservatively assume both, but just thought I'd ask whether you would be willing to consider letting the ns-3 project somehow reuse the theme, as it would save me some work from generating a similar one.
If Octave obtained the theme from some other source that we could fork from, that would also be of possible interest to us.
Thanks,
Tom