Raul Miller wrote: >>Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote: >> >>>But trademarks are names. That's all they are -- not necessarily in >>>roman characters or pronounceable, but names nonetheless. > > On Fri, Sep 24, 2004 at 04:50:37PM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote: > >>That's a huge leap, and I seriously doubt it was intended by the >>drafters of DFSG4. I would argue very strongly against that >>interpretation. A name is just that, a name: some text moniker that >>identifies a project. "GCC", "grub", "Linux", and "Apache" are all >>names. A logo is not a name. > > You're changing the subject from what Brian was talking about: the set of > "trademarks" has only a small area of overlap with the set of "logos". > Sure, there are logos which don't identify anything, but those logos > aren't trademarks.
And in this case, the subject is a logo which is in the intersection of the set of "logos" and the set of "trademarks". "trademark" does not inherently imply "name" in the DFSG4 sense, although most trademarks are of names; neither does "logo". A name is a name, not a logo, not a sound file, not a video clip, and not any other similar work. The sum total of what DFSG4 should permit a license to require is a change in the top-level non-functional string identifier for a work; I would be hesitant to say that it can even require a global s/NAME/SOMETHINGELSE/, especially if that name is ever used in functional manner, such as libNAME.so.42 or NAME_functionname. If we are going to permit arbitrary pieces of a work (including both functional and non-functional components), such as imagery, to be construed as a "name", then we have a serious Freeness problem. > Anyways, could you describe a serious scenario that illustrates this > danger to software freedom that you're so concerned about? [I saw the > scenario where you proposed that we shouldn't discriminate against fraud, > but the philosophy behind your argument would have us declare the GPL > non-free -- so that doesn't seem like a serious issue.] See my reply to that message for why that is a complete misinterpretation of my position; I don't endorse fraud, but I think the proposed license prohibits a vast number of non-fraudulent issues. Examples of acceptable uses of any DFSG-free image, which the proposed logo license would prohibit: * Use as the basis of any logo, for any organization. * Use on the cover of a book. * Use on a website (even of a competing distribution). * Use as the basis for hiding a steganographic message. * Use for Debian-derived distributions (though it would not give them the right to claim endorsement or affiliation, nor would any of the other cases). * Many other uses, few of which fall in the category of "referring to Debian", and none of which fall into the category of "fraud". * Use as the basis for any other image, which can then be used for all the same purposes. To be honest, your arguments remind me strongly of the people who argue that Free Software makes no sense because their competitors might get to use the software too. - Josh Triplett
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