Grsecurity stable patches to be limited to sponsors

Posted Aug 29, 2015 7:00 UTC (Sat) by artem (subscriber, #51262)
In reply to: Grsecurity stable patches to be limited to sponsors by kleptog
Parent article: Grsecurity stable patches to be limited to sponsors

Every time you compile the program with different compiler flags you do not get largely the same thing. Depending on the actual flags involved, there is high chance that you get broken thing - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2958633/gcc-strict-ali... has some examples, although a bit outdated.

I don't think car analogy is particularly good. Android analogy is much better - it's software, it's open source, and it's a trademark.

If what you claim is true, it should be perfectly OK for phone vendor to make small changes to it, compile it for their phone and sell it as 'Android phone', using Google trademark without going through Google-recommended Android Compatibility program. Is any phone vendor actually doing that? Admittedly you won't find definite answer in the open, but existence of android-like devices which carefully avoid using name 'Android' gives you some indication.

From legal point of view, the situation seems identical. Why is Google able to defend their trademark, and Grsecurity team is not?

Grsecurity stable patches to be limited to sponsors

Posted Aug 29, 2015 9:30 UTC (Sat) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (1 responses)

> Every time you compile the program with different compiler flags you do not get largely the same thing. Depending on the actual flags involved, there is high chance that you get broken thing.

Sure, I don't disagree. I was just refuting the idea that just because changing a single bit can break a program doesn't mean that only bit-for-bit identical copies would comply with a trademark. It's a lot fuzzier than that.

> From legal point of view, the situation seems identical. Why is Google able to defend their trademark, and Grsecurity team is not?

IANAL, but from here it looks like that Google (and the other example Firefox) have published trademark policies indicating what they consider acceptable and what not, which makes it easier to enforce. ISTM that what happened here is that it's not clear that the trademark was violated, and the uncertainty costs money/time/effort. Without a written policy you have to argue from general principles, and that's always harder.

Grsecurity stable patches to be limited to sponsors

Posted Aug 29, 2015 9:58 UTC (Sat) by artem (subscriber, #51262) [Link]

> Without a written policy you have to argue from general principles, and that's always harder.

I had a look at trademark policy published by Google. It has 'submit your request to us' form right there. What's published is superficial - you won't know if Google will allow you to call your device 'Android' until you actually negotiated and signed an agreement with Google.

So it looks like the potential threat of sued by Google is a good deterrent, while the same about Grsecurity is not.