On 10/05/2010 12:37 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Mon, 2010-10-04 at 11:08 -0400, Brandon Lozza wrote:
> That's what i've been saying all day. It's only free software if you
> change the name, in which case you may loose brand recognition.
> Imagine if Linus forbid people from calling their OS Linux if they
> didn't use the binaries provided by him.
that's the entire point of having trademarks. Free software projects are
obliged to allow you to access and modify their code. They are not
obliged to allow you to benefit from their reputation.
Close source school of thinking - Trademarks exist to protect an
enterprise's product and to close out "copyiers". FLOSS exists to enable
people "to share".
It doesn't make
any sense to say 'I think this product needs to be modified but I wish
to be able to represent my modified product as being the same thing as
the original product in order to benefit from the reputation attached to
the original product'.
The overwhelming majority of FLOSS project think differently. They are
proud of others picking up their works and to redistribute it.
Or differently: GCC, KDE, QT, GNOME etc. all benefit from them not
applying trademark restrictions, but from being used (in modified
versions) on dozens of OSes, distributions etc.
That said, Fedora's leadership is proud of having pushed Fedora into
isolation.
Ralf