On Wed, Nov 15, 2000 at 04:25:17PM +0100, Joaquin Cuenca Abela wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 04:45:16PM -0500, Justin Wells wrote:
> [snip]
> > We has been discussing this recently with the FSF (though I'm not
> > directly involved and I don't know the current status). The main issue
> > at this point is that we do like the fact that our license prevents
> > third parties from using the word "Apache" in the name of software based
> > on it. This is (AFAIK) the reason RMS says that the ASL is incompatible
> > with the GPL -- he says that restriction violates a portion of section 6
> > of the GPL, in that it imposses additional restrictions.
> >
> > If there's some way to resolve this, though, we'll try to do so.
>
> I don't know all the problem, but I was working in a project (AbiWord) which
> is licensed with the GPL *and* nobody (besides the AbiWord team) can use the
> word AbiWord in the name of software based on it (the company that started
> the developement of AbiWord just trademarked "AbiWord", and thus it's up to
> the company to decidy if a software can use the name "AbiWord").
>
> My laws background is almost 0, and maybe (most probably) I just don't
> understand your problem (if any), but maybe a similar solution may be
> aceptable for both, the FSF and the ASF.
This is very similar to the advice which RMS gave wrt this -- just use
trademark protection.
Copyright-based protection is *very* easy to use, and protects us in the
way we consider important. If someone is using software based on
Apache, it's very very easy to stop them from using a word which
includes Apache. International law is unform, and we don't have to
register the copyright anywhere but in the source code & license.
But trademark protection is not at all uniform; and there's no single
place you can go to register a trademark. Protection of a trademark is
also somewhat more difficult (I'm told by lawyers) and involves a higher
likelyhood of going to court. Given that we don't have the same kind of
resources that companies do, this has proven useful in the past.
And most importantly -- this requriement does not appear (to me) to be
an unreasonable additional requirement to redistribution. Why should we
give up a protection which seems useful when it doesn't hurt anyone?
cheers --
Ed
------------------------------------------------------------
To subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Search: <http://www.mail-archive.com/turbine%40list.working-dogs.com/>
Problems?: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
