On Thursday, 22. January 2009, Tim Moore wrote: > We can't say that "all the models in the repository are covered by the GPL" > and have models in there that are not. This is a terrible trap for anyone > wanting to use FlightGear in any professional setting.
Please do not confuse the software license with other things like trademark law. There will always be things like trademarks, patents, warranty or other local laws that may add further restrictions to what you can do with software regardless of the software's license or it's validity. There are tons of free software that may not distributed as freely, as it's license (mostly GPL) would allow. I mentioned Mozilla Firefox earlier. But there's also things like simple mp3 codecs. Doubtless free software, but not as easy to distribute because of patent law in some countries. A copyright license can and should only care about copyright. It cannot free you from checking your other laws that may prevent you from doing what you want. Maybe you are not even allowed to sell _any_ software. That's not even a contrieved example: a four-year-old is not allowed to do so because he cannot enter a valid contract (which a sell would be). Does that make the GPL invalid? Of course not. So your museum just has two choices: * contact Boeing and get a license not for the software, but for the trademark * remove the usage of the trademark from the software before selling it There's nothing we could do about this. Except of course to abstain from using the trademarks in the first place. But as we have permission to use them for the stuff we really care about, I see no strong enough reason to do so. I'd just be nice to people and remind them to check their trademark usage. Stefan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
