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This is not a good trend

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 2, 2025 23:37 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: This is not a good trend by NYKevin
Parent article: Fedora discusses Flatpak priorities

Before anyone misinterprets my comment and insists that I must be wrong, I will clarify: I am talking about trademark law. You still have independent obligations under copyright law.

In the case of the GPL (and most FOSS licenses), there is indeed a requirement to preserve the copyright notice. But a copyright notice is a single line, usually at the top of LICENSE.txt (or COPYING.txt, or whatever your FOSS project decided to call it), that names the author(s) of the software. Hardly anyone ever looks at it, except incidentally when they're trying to check what license is applicable. The name and branding of the product is an entirely different thing altogether, and no FOSS license (that I have ever heard of) explicitly requires you to preserve such branding.

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This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 3, 2025 9:44 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

That GPL clause that was pointed out to me elsewhere in this article basically described trademarks and it seems pretty clear to me - whether you are allowed or required to remove distinguishing marks is at the mark-owner's discretion. As explicitly stated in the GPL itself.

Cheers,
Wol


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