tis 2013-08-20 klockan 23:22 +0100 skrev luke.leighton: > i see your point. one might reasonably claim that by including the > trademarks - and distributing them under the GPL - that canonical has > GPL-licensed those words. thus it cannot therefore impose > restrictions without itself losing rights under the GPL [and likewise > neither can redhat. dang. how long has it been before anybody even > noticed this, bruce?? :) ]
It's been discussed before. Anyway, here is my take. Any Linux distribution as a whole is never GPL-only. It is an aggregate of many componends with a range of different licenses, more or less GPL (in)compatible. Since the components of a Linux distribution coexists by aggregation and not linking the GPL do not extend across the component boundaries. Because of this such aggregation can include components that are incompatible with the GPL, for example a package with trademark images and somewhat restrictive redistribution & use licenses. Any such aggregate distribution might be considered a non-Free distribution if you like, but is not automatically a GPL violation. > however any company, individual or organisation that takes ubuntu > .debs and say even *adds* to them, that's redistribution, and they > will be forced - like the company that i work for who maintain their > own internal mirror and add their own packages - to comply with the > stupid requirements. It's not stupid requirements. Trademark owners have to protect their trademark, and much stronger so than the similar needs in protecting Copyrights. If you don't restrict trademark usage in a sensible manner you risk it becoming commons and no longer a trademark. As result you will find this kinds of restriction each time there is a trademark involved. Even Debian have restrictions on how you may use the Debian trademarks, quite notably related to this discussion "You cannot use Debian trademarks [...] as the name of a product or service.". In essence it's not a problem from GPL perspective. But yes, it's annoying from an administrative perspective. Regards Henrik
