Andrew Suffield wrote: > On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 08:21:39PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: >>>What do you mean by "solid legal argument"? Do we need to find a >>>lawyer to check my reasoning? >> >>Lawyers have told people that releasing images of their trademarks under >>a free license would potentially harm their trademarks. As a >>consequence, they potentially release them under a non-free license. > > Not much we can do about that, if true. Sounds like the old "free > software destroys intellectual property" noise. > > I don't really think that trademarks fit with the spirit of free > software (despite it being possible to use them), and I'd raise > serious questions about why they're trying to use them at all. Raising > artificial barriers to forking is a *bad* thing.
I think there are reasonable ways to use trademarks with Free Software. The appropriate usage of trademarks is to uniquely identify the software, not to raise a barrier to forking. For example, a trademark can be used to support a requirement that modified versions must use a different name. This is not a barrier to forking, just a requirement that the fork does not masquerade as the original software. Such a suggestion is the perfect response to those who argue that standards cannot be Free Software because the standard itself must not be changed: if modified versions cannot use the name of the standard, then that is sufficient to maintain the standard. Of course, such a requirement can be done with a copyright license as well, but if a trademark is simply used to reinforce the requirement, then it is still Free. For example, "Abiword" is a trademarked name; Abisource requires that modified versions of Abiword are either called "Abiword Personal", or that they don't have "Abiword" in the name. This is a perfectly reasonable application of a trademark to Free Software, and Debian distributes of Abiword using the branding "Abiword Personal". - Josh Triplett
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