[dundee] questions about GPL

[Roger Leigh]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 10:56:17AM +0200, Tim Spencer wrote:
> I knew you had to reference exsisting programmer in the code and also
> provide users with the source code but is the below allowed for code
> realeased under GPL.
> 
> "According to the GPL our branding information must be displayed even if
> > you modify the source code of the viewer."

This is not allowed for GPL code.  Even if the code had trademarked
logos or graphics contained within it, you are entirely within your
rights to delete them in their entirety--then you are not falling
foul of trademark law.  You might be required to preserve authorship
information, but where and how this is done is normally up to you,
and this certainly does not extend to "branding".

The other thing about the GPL is that it does not allow "additional
restrictions", which the above would imply.  See GPL3 sections 7 and
10.

As mentioned already in this thread, Mozilla as distributed by Debian
had the issue of the Mozilla trademarks not being licensed for use if
the source code was modified.  Since this meant that Debian could never
make any changes (even security updates) without official blessing from
Mozilla, the only solution was to strip out every trademarked item
(including the name Firefox) from the codebase, and distribute it as
"Iceweasel".  This was however not a licensing issue, but a trademark
issue--the codebase is the exact same one as for firefox, with the
trademarked content replaced with non-trademarked content. Mozilla have
never had an issue with us doing this--they just only wanted their
trademark to appear on their official releases, to avoid the name being
associated with bad forks (e.g. buggy stuff, malware), whereas the
above is actually saying the opposite--that if you make any changes you
must retain their "branding".  It's quite possible that they have got
copyright and trademarks confused here--I would suggest contacting them
directly and asking them to clear up the ambiguity between the GPL and
their restriction here.


Regards,
Roger

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