Trademarks: A threat to free software's freedom? (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

Trademarks: A threat to free software's freedom? (NewsForge)

Posted Nov 6, 2004 16:11 UTC (Sat) by dkite (guest, #4577)
In reply to: Trademarks: A threat to free software's freedom? (NewsForge) by copsewood
Parent article: Trademarks: A threat to free software's freedom? (NewsForge)

You make a good point. What if someone nefarious decided to name their
proprietary spam filter Spamassasin? Or their proprietary spreadsheet
Gnumeric? Or Opera deciding it could increase their marketshare by
renaming their product Firefox or Konqueror?

Get it here for $49.95!

These names have value. Linux, Evolution, Gnome, Kde, Firefox, Apache,
PHP, Perl, etc. They mean something good, useful, solid, free, etc.

The GPL uses copyright law to protect free software developers, at the
same time encouraging free use and modification. Maybe we need a GPT
which protects trademarks from nefarious uses while allowing the freedoms
we expect in line with the GPL.

Derek

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Trademarks: A threat to free software's freedom? (NewsForge)

Posted Nov 8, 2004 12:53 UTC (Mon) by greve (subscriber, #8385) [Link]

You might be interested in the trademark license that FSFE has published for AGNULA to make sure that people will get 100% Free Software when they get something under this name:

http://fsfeurope.org/projects/agnula/license.en.html