Re: Trademark license compatibility with GPL and/or DFSG
xanthophile@gmail.com wrote:
>On the other hand, any trademark license would permit us to use their
>trademark, which we could not do otherwise.
This is a misunderstanding of trademark.
It is always legal to describe the driver as being "a driver by <author>
intended for use with <trademark>", because that can't cause confusion about
the origin of the driver. You should do this.
I think that naming the driver after the trademark might indeed be a trademark
violation, because it might theoretically cause confusion about the origin of
the driver. Now, Linux drivers often have nonobvious names which don't match
the hardware's commercial name. So I think you should go ahead and name the
driver with some non-trademarked name, and just describe it as "intended for
use with <trademark>" everywhere it's mentioned.
If it was a debian package, you would unfortunately really want to have the
trademark in the package name so that users could find the package using the
standrd search facilities in dselect. However, that doesn't seem to be the
issue right now, so I won't try to work out a solution for that right now.
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