Re: License of old GNU Emacs manual
On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 12:12:42AM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> We can provide the logo under a free copyright license but fairly strict
> trademark license. A restrictive copyright license prevents legitimate
> modifications as well, which isn't what we want.
It's not clear whether a work which is affected by a "strict" trademark
license is DFSG-free. I don't think much headway has ever been made
on figuring out how trademarks and the DFSG interact, probably because
there hasn't been much need (the logos clearly havn't been sufficient).
I suspect the Mozilla issue may make that happen, though.
My intuition is that the Open Use logo should be under a Free copyright
license and no trademark, and allowed in main, and the Official Use logo
should be under a strict trademark license, and not allowed in main. It
doesn't seem to make sense that a logo with a license (of any sort) that
says "this image can only be used for these purposes" belongs in main,
even Debian's.
I don't know if Mozilla-in-Debian should be renamed to avoid the trademark
entirely, or if it's acceptable for a work in main to be affected by a
non-free trademark license if it's readily changed. As long as it's an
easy change, it feels like a change-of-name requirement, eg. DFSG#4.
At a glance, that seems contradictory: a trademarked logo not allowed,
but a trademarked name allowed. But one's a work in itself, with
restrictions on that work (the logo), and the other is a name, which
we allow requirements to change.
It also seems to make sense from a licensing standpoint: people will
frequently be told that "renaming requirements" in a copyright license
are pointless, since someone can always create an independant work
which is easily confused with that work (eg. fork sendmail and call
it "Postfix"), and that trademarks are the correct approach. So, it
seems to make sense that DFSG#4 allow implementing change-of-name
requirements via trademark.
I'm not certain about any of this, though.
--
Glenn Maynard
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