"Ramanraj K" ramanraj.k@gmail.com writes:
On the contrary, the scary thing about the proposed GPL is that users, developers or distributors could be hauled up for not so obvious trademark violations. Trademarks are just proprietary shit
- you would not want to touch them. Free software has nothing much
to do with trademarks, warranties, income tax, sales tax/vat, central excise, and a lot of other things, which may be attracted in various jurisdictions under various circumstances, but do not concern us at all.
``If you modify it, you should call it something else'' is a perfectly acceptable condition; it does not reduce the freeness of the software in any manner whatsoever. (it may confuse users, like ``absence'' of Mozilla or Firefox in Debian but that does ot make to software any less non-free).
Such explicit conditions - that modified files should be named differently already exist in the Latex Publix License.
The LPPL 1.3a and 1.2 licenses are free licenses, but incompatible with the GPL.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html
Ditto with GPL'ed software carrying trademarked names. I do not see why project ``foo'' includes a condition that modified versions of ``foo'' should carry a different name.
Free software packages need and could use only non-proprietary generic names for identification, and inviting people to use trademarks for identifying the package itself is needles and only promotes the proprietary culture. Worse, it could easily be used to defeat copyleft freedom.
OTOH, free software need to have AT LEAST a marginal claim on the names of the programs it provides.
Please the consider of impact it will have on users if some evil corporation launches a complete (as in complete with kernel, browsers, officer suite, etc) OS under a proprietary license and names it ``GNU''. Users will be utterly confused, and the community will be helpless to do anything about it.
That said, free software projects should have a very liberal trademark policy, if the project claims trade mark on names of its binaries.
Red Hat (and most commercial distributions) have a very good Trade mark policy in place - have a tight control over commercial versions (like RHEL and SuSe), and allow non-commercial variants (like Fedora, and OpenSuSe).
Mozilla foundation and the GNOME foundations too claim trademerks on their names. Linus too claims trademark on the name linux.
Such control over the names, is, IMHO necessary - but projects should have the flexibility in controllin the names.
Clause 7 makes room for clauses, which could be used to force you to use or not use alleged trademarks, and police modifications. The clause has the potential to cause distension in the free software community and the greatest danger is that it would make the GPL irrelevant in the free software community.
I am not so sure as you are on this, but now that you point out this out, I will re-read the clause.
TRIPs was negotiated in 1994, much after GPLv2 was published in 1991. After TRIPs, computer programs may be protected only as literary works, and misapplication of patent law to computer programs deserves to be challenged if any of the signatories to TRIPs continue its practice.
The signatories to the respective treaties do not share your view; and we are severly handicapped by the official interpretation of the treaties. Unfortunately, it is the official interpretations which will be upheld in courts of law, and we will have to accept that constraints for the time being.
It is mostly the proprietary software companies that support the illegal practice of "software patents", and any clause in the GPL now, as though "Software Patents" are legitimate, would only operate as estoppel against authors who wish to question the practice in the US, discouraging the use of the GPL. "Software patents" are an illegitimate practice and clauses based on such a practice could only be seen as opposed to public policy.