No trademarks in upstream source [LWN.net]

No trademarks in upstream source

Posted Mar 5, 2025 12:58 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: No trademarks in upstream source by pabs
Parent article: Fedora discusses Flatpak priorities

Copyright is also "inherently proprietary" but the presence of copyrighted code in a repository doesn't meant it is no longer free software. There is usually a licence granting back some of the rights reserved to the copyright holder. The same could be done for trademarks: you may call your modified version of grep "Billy's grep (TM)" but only under certain conditions. Perhaps trademarks could also be used for copyleft purposes: make any changes you like and redistribute them as free software, and you can keep using the trademark; if you want to incorporate the code in a proprietary product, you may do that, but must strip the trademark.

I agree that it's good practice to isolate logos, product names and so on in one place, so they can easily be stripped out or changed. A single subdirectory of the source tree would work; then package builders could remove or patch that at the start of the build process.

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No trademarks in upstream source

Posted Mar 5, 2025 13:23 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> make any changes you like and redistribute them as free software, and you can keep using the trademark;

That's actually *extremely* *dangerous* to upstream, and that's why FLOSS (and the GPL) has (or should have) absolutely no problems with trademarks.

And again, that's why all this blew up with Fedora.

We're all happy with DCOs and Linux enforcing them (along with lots of other Free Software projects). What exactly is the difference between a DCO, and a trademark (other than *registered* trademarks having legal clout)?

A DCO is all about a developer taking responsibility for their code. A trademark is all about a project taking responsibility for their code. You'd get well pissed off if I submitted (broken) code and put your DCO on it, wouldn't you? So why is everyone up in arms about a project getting upset because somebody is using their trademarks to pass off a broken version of the project as being upstream's fault?

A DCO is all about taking responsibility for your own work - good OR bad. A trademark is all about taking responsibility for your own work - good OR bad. And you don't put *somebody* *else's* marks on your own work so that you can avoid responsibility when it all goes pear shaped!!!

(That's why I, and I suspect most other FLOSS guys, have no trouble with you taking my work AND ADDING YOUR OWN MARKS. The problem here, is Fedora didn't - or if they did those marks were rather too well hidden.)

The GPL actually *demands* you add your marks to the source. I actually think it's a bug it doesn't demand you add them to the binary (if distributed where the end user is unlikely to see the source)!

Cheers,
Wol