Uoti Urpala <uoti.urp...@pp1.inet.fi> writes: > Russ Allbery wrote:
>> DFSG #4 is narrower than the possible actions that could be required by >> a trademark policy, at least in the way that we've normally interpreted >> it, since we've not interpreted it as allowing the renaming to affect >> functional elements of the program. In other words, our historic >> interpretation of DFSG #4 is that saying that you have to rename The >> Foo Library to something else if you modify it is okay (if not >> preferred), but requiring that you also rename all the functions in the >> public API from foo_* to something else is a violation of the DFSG. > Does the naming of library functions really fall under trademarks? I > wouldn't expect the use of a trademarked name as part of a function name > to require permission (so even if a trademark policy had a clause trying > to forbid that, it'd have no effect on an otherwise renamed program). I don't know. I'm not a trademark lawyer. It's not obvious to me that they don't, though, given that the purpose of trademarks is to avoid causing confusion in the general public, and having a modified library not eligible for the trademark providing an identical API seems like it would pass a prima facie test for possibly causing confusion. (Please note: that doesn't imply that I think such a case would win in court necessarily, only that it's not obvious to me that trademarks don't apply.) There was extensive discussion over whether the Firefox trademark applied to the command-line program, which strikes me as a very similar sort of case. As with the API of a library, the command-line invocation is the interface that's exposed to the user of the product. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87ehhtwp12....@windlord.stanford.edu
