Re: Inbound trademark policy, round 3

[Uoti Urpala <uoti.urpala@pp1.inet.fi>]

Russ Allbery wrote:
> Uoti Urpala <uoti.urpala@pp1.inet.fi> writes:
> > DFSG allow a rename requirement; this means any trademark policy
> > whatsoever cannot violate DFSG as long as it allows distributing
> > unmodified sources and binaries, as you can always rename and then
> > ignore the trademark policy.
> 
> DFSG #4 is narrower than the possible actions that could be required by a
> trademark policy, at least in the way that we've normally interpreted it,
> since we've not interpreted it as allowing the renaming to affect
> functional elements of the program.  In other words, our historic
> interpretation of DFSG #4 is that saying that you have to rename The Foo
> Library to something else if you modify it is okay (if not preferred), but
> requiring that you also rename all the functions in the public API from
> foo_* to something else is a violation of the DFSG.

Does the naming of library functions really fall under trademarks? I
wouldn't expect the use of a trademarked name as part of a function name
to require permission (so even if a trademark policy had a clause trying
to forbid that, it'd have no effect on an otherwise renamed program).