Hi all, I'm finally having another look at packaging limesurvey for Debian (http://www.limesurvey.org/). Licensing mostly looks fine: It is mostly GPL v2 or later; one bit is PHP, and the rest is LGPL. (There is a reference to a problematic license in the license file, but actually that is outdated.)
The difficult part is the trademark issue. The website (http://www.limesurvey.org/en/about-limesurvey/license) reads (numbering by me): 1. Trademark License for LimeSurvey™ 2. The name LimeSurvey™ and the logo is a registered trademark of Fa. Carsten Schmitz / Germany. 3. If you are intending to use the name (and/or logo) to advertise generic LimeSurvey services (eg LimeSurvey Hosting, LimeSurvey Support, LimeSurvey Certification, LimeSurvey Training, LimeSurvey Consulting, LimeSurvey Customisation, LimeSurvey Theme design, LimeSurvey Integrations, LimeSurvey Installations, etc) or as the name of a software package, then you must seek and receive direct permission in writing from Carsten Schmitz, in accordance with normal trademark restrictions. 4. Do also not try to use or create similar logo/names resembling the LimeSurvey trademark without explicit permission. 5. There are no restrictions on how you use the name in other contexts (for example, if you use LimeSurvey just to provide non-commerical courses (non-commercial means also no ads either!) then you can use the name freely to refer to it.) If you aren't sure of a particular case, please ask Carsten Schmitz: he'll be happy to either provide you with official permission in writing or help you fix your wording. I am currently trying to get clarification about paragraph 3; it seems that the intention is that one cannot use "limesurvey" to describe software which isn't limesurvey (perfectly reasonable), but that is not what the wording says, and it seems to contradict the terms of the GPL; I have suggested that if this is the intention, that they improve the wording slightly to make this clearer. The question I then have (assuming that paragraph 3 can be resolved satisfactorily) is whether I can package the software as-is, or whether I have to rebrand it or at least remove references to LimeSurvey because it contains trademarks? I'm thinking of Firefox vs. Iceweasel as I write this, and am unsure of what to do. If it's going to be an excessive amount of work to make it DFSG-free, it's not really worth the effort of packaging it, I would guess. Thanks for any thoughts on this one! Julian -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
