2005/10/11, Michael K. Dolan Jr. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > Guys, LOGOS AND TRADEMARKS (Trademark Law) cannot be GPL'd (Copyright > Law). They will always be owned by an entity and under Trademark law, > that owner MUST enforce compliance or else they loose their rights to > the trademark. (See all the Australian / use of Linux press articles, > Linus' explanation, etc). It's a simple matter of protecting the > names/trademarks. So for instance, MSFT can't start distributing Suse > Linux next week - something the trademark owner would obviously like to > protect/prevent. > > Take a look at Whitebox Linux: They take Red Hat's distro, strip the > logos/trademarks, and repackage it. It's that simple. This is no > different with Suse than with Red Hat or Ubuntu or Gentoo (yes, > Ubuntu/Debian/Gentoo all own their trademarks and are no different). Why > is this so difficult to understand? It does not prevent you from doing > anything but violate Novell and Suse's trademarks. Meaning, you cannot > sell Novell branded CD/DVD's to a company using Novell's name and > Trademarks. > > So no, you will never see anything in the GPL that affects trademark law > protected things like Logos. It just can't/will never happen. The OSS > Distro has only GPL/FOSS licensed works as far as I've read so there > should be no problems here - just don't infringe on the marks. > > And no I do not work for Novell/Suse. I'm just calling it as it is. >
Ok, but I have never see that probed in court, have you ? And if not probedit in court at least it should be written in some place, it is ?? For example what you call logos trademark I can easily called art work. What you are saying is that I can't sell a CD and called SUSE or Novell, I agree with that, but what about the SUSE and Novell logos that come inside the cdrom in a GPLd package, package that have been gpld for SUSE/Novell it self. -- Marcel Mourguiart
