On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:56 PM, Richard Fontana <fontana@sharpeleven.org> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 03:30:16PM -0800, Mike Linksvayer wrote:

> >    This License does not {+grant any rights in My name, trademarks, service
> >    marks, or logos.
>
> Not a substantial change, but I wonder why the substance is needed.
> The grant is explicitly one of copyright. Lots of popular FLOSS
> licenses don't mention trademark.

That is true. As I think I noted on identica, I was influenced here by
past discussions (not about this license, but FLOSS generally) with
Pam Chestek. If she sees this, maybe she'd be willing to provide a
better justification than I can (for why, say, the GPL might be better
off with this kind of clause as a built-in provision - GPLv3
explicitly authorizes such a clause as an 'additional requirement'),
though I note that I'm solely to blame for putting this provision
in. It was actually one of the first things I added when working from
the GPLv3 text, as I recall.

I would prefer to leave it. While I have made what I believe is a well-supported argument that open source licenses are not trademark licenses, I don't think it's universally accepted or glaringly obvious, so there is room for a court to decide otherwise. (The "Enigma" decision in Germany is one example of a case where there may have been a somewhat different outcome on trademark infringement because the product was under an open source license.)  Most importantly, there are still many users who have not grasped the concept that permission to use the name and the code don't necessarily run together, so I think there is an important audience for an express statement in the license. 

Pam