On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> I believe that you can distribute a program under the GNU General Public
> License and a seperate Trademark license. That is what AbiSource does with
> AbiWord. And I don't think it restricts the freedom of the user since it
> is still allowed to distribute derived works.
Being an AbiWord developer, I know something about this.
Sourcegear (the company that owns AbiWord) does two things. 1) They state
(as you later suggest) that the GPL does not give the end user (or anyone
else) the right to use their trademarks. In fact, they have a very
restrictive liscence on said trademarks. [1] 2) They grant users the
right to distribute modified versions of the software using said
trademarks, provided that the suffix "Personal" is attached. In this
vein, they distribute freely some images with the source version of
AbiWord, and others with the binary releases. The binary release images
specify AbiWord (as opposed to AbiWord Personal) and cannot be
redistributed (although the software of course can, it being GPL).
While I hope they would do the right thing with the trademarks if they
stopped developing AbiWord, this seems like a workable approach.
sam th
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.abisource.com/~sam
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