Dear Debian Legal, An upstream has named their GPL software almost identically to a proprietary piece of software. Both the free and the proprietary software are developed in the U.S.A. The upstream has confirmed that the name is not a registered trademark in the U.S.A, but the proprietary software unambiguously precedes the free version; thus, if ever there is a dispute, the developer of the first version has the "prior art" argument on their side. The developer of the free software implementation has asked me if it would be sufficient to ask permission from the author of the proprietary developer to name his software similarly. If this is acceptable, would you please provide a template I can send to the author of the free implementation? The degree of similarity as close as "Quake" and "Quake-world". Sincerely, Nicholas
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