On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 08:57:56PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote: > I don't know of anywhere that "Powered by SugarCRM" is a legal notice. > Does anyone? What legal effect does it have?
I worked on the drafting of GPLv3 at my previous job (no tomatoes, please :). You may note that section 7 of (A)GPLv3 says that it is not a GPL-incompatible "further restriction" for one (with appropriate copyright authorization) to "Require preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it". The FSF was convinced by certain arguments at the time that a conventional "Powered by" logo, such as were in vogue at the time for certain companies, was equivalent to an author attribution (if the logo in some sense did, in fact, refer to the 'author'). SugarCRM relicensed to GPLv3 shortly after the FSF's final publication of GPLv3. The additional licensing terms concerning the logo and so forth that were in place at the time met with the FSF's approval. I haven't followed how those notices have changed, if at all, over time, beyond being aware that SugarCRM at some point relicensed from GPLv3 to AGPLv3. I have generally regarded what SugarCRM did in mid-2007 as the outer bound of what is acceptable "badgeware" under (A)GPLv3. I believe very strongly that to the extent such provisions authorize "badgeware" terms they must be construed very narrowly. As an example of how I've applied this in practice, working with the Fedora Project, we succeeded in getting Zarafa to revise its AGPLv3 additional terms to scale them back to approximately what SugarCRM had been doing. - Richard -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20111214211704.ga6...@redhat.com
