Re: Inbound trademark policy, round 3
Uoti Urpala <uoti.urpala@pp1.inet.fi> writes:
> DFSG allow a rename requirement; this means any trademark policy
> whatsoever cannot violate DFSG as long as it allows distributing
> unmodified sources and binaries, as you can always rename and then
> ignore the trademark policy.
DFSG #4 is narrower than the possible actions that could be required by a
trademark policy, at least in the way that we've normally interpreted it,
since we've not interpreted it as allowing the renaming to affect
functional elements of the program. In other words, our historic
interpretation of DFSG #4 is that saying that you have to rename The Foo
Library to something else if you modify it is okay (if not preferred), but
requiring that you also rename all the functions in the public API from
foo_* to something else is a violation of the DFSG.
This is not spelled out explicitly in DFSG #4. If we ever did revise the
DFSG, it would be nice to make this clearer, since it's come up in some
difficult cases (such as with various drafts of the LaTeX license due to
the way that LaTeX components work).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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