IMO, a requirement that a logo be included is not an additional restriction permitted by the GPLv3. Under Section 7(b), it is not a "legal notice" (a trademark is not a notice, it's branding) or an "author attribution" (copyright authorship and branding are entirely different things). It is effectively the opposite of what Sections 7(c), (d) and (e) permit, forcing the misrepresentation of the product if someone has modified the code (the logo indicates that the product is the authentic original software but it may not be if it's been modified), it is forcing using a name for publicity purposes, and it is requiring the use of a trademark, not prohibiting it.

Pam Chestek


On Wed, Jul 28, 2021 at 2:48 PM Pete Savage <psavage@redhat.com> wrote:
Hi all,

I am working on a package for the sFizz project which provides a VST3 plugin, among others. The VST3 SDK from Steinberg is licensed under a compatible license, but imposes extra "guidelines" which has previously seen it be inadmissible in the Fedora repos and lead to some considerable effort to work around. One of the developers of sFizz asked the question on the Steinberg Forum:

https://forums.steinberg.net/t/vst-3-sdk-licensing-faq/201638/20?u=jpcima

Which contains relevant links, however I also received other information from another source that stated:

Section 7: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html
All other non-permissive additional terms are considered “further restrictions” within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.

Yet someone else countered this with:

Section 7 also contains a list of non-permissive additional terms that *are* allowed to be imposed on top of the gpl

Can someone comment on this please, I'd prefer not to have to strip the VST plugin as it is the preferred format and would take considerable effort to do so.

Pete


_______________________________________________
legal mailing list -- legal@lists.fedoraproject.org
To unsubscribe send an email to legal-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org
Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/legal@lists.fedoraproject.org
Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure