> Gee... is "Sage" a trademark? > > Besides, I don't think a trademark is that strong... E.g. "firefox" is > a trademark of mozilla. Debian doesn't want to be bound by the terms > of use of said trademark, so the rename the program to "iceweasel". > All visible occurrences of the name "firefox" are replaced by > "iceweasel". However, I can still launch iceweasel by running > "firefox" from the command line. Is this a trademark violation? > > Now, if "Sage" where a trademark, then "sage-ultralight" would clearly > be a trademark violation. But say the program is called "fuchsia" > instead. Fuchsia is a clone of Sage, and it is meant to execute the > same scripts as Sage itself. Then it's not clear that it would be a > trademark violation for fuchsia to provide a "sage.py" file for > compatibility purposes, i.e. just so that "import foo from sage.bar" > works the same. > > IOW, you cannot create a GUI toolkit named "Qt", but you may be able > create a GUI toolkit with a different name and provide header files > using the same filenames as qt (at least wrt trademark... then there > is arguing about whether interfaces are copyrightable or not...)
Trademark violations occur if the use of the mark causes confusion. If someone copied Sage (e.g. a fork) and called it fushsia it would not cause confusion. If starting fushsia was done by typing "sage" or, when fushsia starts it "announces" itself as "sage" then there is clearly a claim of "confusion". Thus, to avoid confusion the fushsia project should change all references to "sage" to read "fushsia", including the launching script. The GPL says nothing about trademarks, as far as I'm aware. It is based on copyright, a whole different area of law. Tim Daly --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
