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Apple buys cupsApple buys cupsPosted Jul 19, 2007 5:26 UTC (Thu) by malor (subscriber, #2973)In reply to: Apple buys cups by jwb Parent article: Apple buys cups
The GPL gives you rights to the code, but not to the name. You can take the CUPS code and do anything with it that the GPL allows, but you can't CALL it CUPS if Apple doesn't want you to.
Overall, this is a pretty good tradeoff. It lets you modify code and distribute your changes, but it doesn't let you pass off your work as Apple's. By exercising control over the trademark, Apple can ensure its reputation isn't damaged by bugs and misfeatures you introduce, without actually preventing you from creating them. You get the freedoms the GPL cares about, and Apple can protect its good name.
This is the same reason that CheapBytes couldn't sell 'Red Hat Linux' CDs. They could make verbatim copies and sell them, but they couldn't call them Red Hat without permission. They had full rights to the code, but not to the trademark.
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Apple buys cups Posted Jul 19, 2007 8:48 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] Eventually it wasn't even true that CheapBytes could make verbatim copies. Nearly everything _interesting_ on the RHEL CDs or DVD is Free Software, but the contents also include Red Hat's trademarked logo, some branded documentation and contributed demoware, samples of future as-yet non-free software and so on.
Installing Dave's Linux and getting a Red Hat branded system is clearly not much more acceptable trademark-wise than just allowing Dave to call it Red Hat cheap edition so that had to stop.
So the similar-to-Red-Hat products you can download today are rebuilt from source with the trademarks removed where possible. They're recognisably Red Hat derived, but there's nothing to mislead the user into thinking that it's actually a Red Hat product, and I think that if you asked these other distributors after all this time, they'd agree that's a good thing.
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