Hi While working on a package (not yet part of Debian), I noticed the following copyright and license notice: # This copyrighted material is made available to anyone wishing to use, # modify, copy, or redistribute it subject to the terms and conditions of # the GNU General Public License v.2, or (at your option) any later version. # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT # ANY WARRANTY expressed or implied, including the implied warranties of # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General # Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the # GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the # Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA # 02110-1301, USA. Any Red Hat trademarks that are incorporated in the # source code or documentation are not subject to the GNU General Public # License and may only be used or replicated with the express permission of # Red Hat, Inc. The first part obviously is just stating that the file in question is being made available under the GPL-2 (or any later version) license. However, how does the trademark notice play with that? If that was a BSD-3-clause license, I assume that this additional specification wouldn't interact badly (as long as the trademark holder and author as the same legal person), but I am unsure how GPL-2+ compatible that actually is. One might argue that this a combination of the third BSD-3-clause license clause with GPL-2+ and since BSD-3-clause is compatible (to a degree) with GPL-2+ through LGPL-2.1(+), this usage should be fine. Pure speculation on my side only, though. Additionally, if the trademark clause as such does not cause licensing issues, do I have to mention it in debian/copyright explicitly? How would I do so correctly? By "creating" a new tag like "GPL-2+-with-trademark-exception" and copying the full notice? Thank you for any advice. Mihai
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