On Wed, Jan 31, 2018 at 07:14:43AM +1100, Ben Finney wrote: > Mihai Moldovan <io...@ionic.de> writes: > > > While working on a package (not yet part of Debian), I noticed the following > > copyright and license notice: > > Thank you for posting the full text of the grant of license. > > > # This copyrighted material is made available to anyone wishing to use, > > # modify, copy, or redistribute it subject to the terms and conditions of > > # the GNU General Public License v.2, or (at your option) any later version. > > […] Any Red Hat trademarks that are incorporated in the > > # source code or documentation are not subject to the GNU General Public > > # License and may only be used or replicated with the express permission of > > # Red Hat, Inc. > > This is confusing, because the GNU GPL v2 has no mention of trademark. I > would advise the copyright holder to phrase this in terms of what the > GPL actually permits or forbids.
(Red Hat lawyer here) This is a really old form of Red Hat license notice. It predates my original joining of Red Hat in 2008, even though, if this is about the Spice project (https://www.spice-space.org/), that project did not exist as such until after 2008. As soon as I became aware of it I got rid of it as an internally-recommended license notice. If anyone wants to submit a patch to the project proposing that this language be replaced -- say, with the FSF-recommended language contained in GPLv2 -- I will be supportive. (Since it doesn't strike me as the most egregious or important problem in the world and I have a lot of other things to do at the moment I am not likely to act on this myself in the short term.) Richard