Hi Tommy and thanks for this (well-deserved) question, Le mardi, 24 décembre 2013, 19.26:54 Tommy Bongaerts a écrit : > As we probable are all aware of, the CUPS name and logo are trademarks > owned by Apple. On the CUPS website at http://www.cups.org we can > read that one cannot use the name and logo on derivative works > without Apple's consent. > > Since the Debian package for CUPS contains a number of patches that > are not in the upstream source code, I think it's safe to say the > Debian's version of CUPS can be called a derivative work. > > My question: did Debian ever got Apple's consent to redistribute their > modified version of CUPS under the same trademarked name and bearing > the trademarked logo? Apparently so. Quoting the 1.3.7-6 changelog, where the name of the source was changed from cupsys to cups: > cups (1.3.7-6) unstable; urgency=low > > * Rename the package to cups. This is the proper upstream name. > Upstream has made it clear that the usual distro patches are not a > trademark violation. This unbreaks all the documentation out > there, which refers to "cups", not "cupsys" (including names of > the init script), as well as unbreaks dependencies of > openprinting.org's LSB printer driver packages. > (Closes: #482296, LP: #233790) > (…) > -- Martin Pitt <mpitt@debian.org> Fri, 23 May 2008 00:32:17 +0200 I must state though that a) I couldn't find a public statement from Apple to confirm this; b) my work on cups started well after that, so I never cared about this issue. Finally, this trademark policy is apparently quite standard in free software; also the usual policy for software _names_ is to not care for a renaming unless asked otherwise, which never happenned in this case. Also, Apple releases a GPL-2 tarball including the cups trademark and logo, thereby explicitely allowing modifications of them. Cheers, OdyX
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