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Re: Thoughts on GPL's Appropriate Legal Notices? or the CPAL?



Richard Fontana <rfontana@redhat.com>
> On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 08:57:56PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> > I don't know of anywhere that "Powered by SugarCRM" is a legal notice.
> > Does anyone?  What legal effect does it have?
> 
> I worked on the drafting of GPLv3 at my previous job (no tomatoes,
> please :). You may note that section 7 of (A)GPLv3 says that it is not
> a GPL-incompatible "further restriction" for one (with appropriate
> copyright authorization) to "Require preservation of specified
> reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in
> the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it".
> 
> The FSF was convinced by certain arguments at the time that a
> conventional "Powered by" logo, such as were in vogue at the time for
> certain companies, was equivalent to an author attribution (if the
> logo in some sense did, in fact, refer to the 'author'). 

You're not there any more so I'll spare you my tomatoes about the
buggy software and processes used for the public drafting of the
GPLv3, the way the private sector outnumbered the civil and the
generally opaque manner of the FSF around that time.

Can you remember what arguments support the idea that "Powered by
SugarCRM" is an author attribution?

Especially in cases like this, I think the man on the Clapham omnibus
would probably assume it referred to the running software, rather than
the non-author licensor - it's not a Matrix-style or BlackMirror-style
human-powered world.  This seems deeply counter-intuitive to me and
it's not in the FAQ.

> SugarCRM relicensed to GPLv3 shortly after the FSF's final publication
> of GPLv3. The additional licensing terms concerning the logo and so
> forth that were in place at the time met with the FSF's approval.

This raises two questions that I can't follow now:

1. Anyone know where is that approval documented?

2. What were the terms in place around 29 June 2007 compared to now?

> As an example of how I've applied this in practice, working with the
> Fedora Project, we succeeded in getting Zarafa to revise its AGPLv3
> additional terms to scale them back to approximately what SugarCRM had
> been doing.

I thought Zarafa relied on a trademark.  I don't know the Fedora
Project well enough: where might I find that work described?  (So far
I found https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=498194 but it's
not specific about this aspect.)

Thanks,
-- 
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
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