On Fri, Nov 12, 2021 at 11:52 AM Jilayne Lovejoy <jlovejoy@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > On 11/11/21 9:35 PM, Richard Fontana wrote: > > On Thu, Nov 11, 2021 at 2:59 PM Ben Cotton <bcotton@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> I understand the philosophical issue with restricting renaming > >> generally. But I think if we go down that road, that represents a > >> significant policy shift from our past practice. > > OK, well I withdraw my objections to treating this as an acceptable > > Fedora license for fonts. I reserve the right to complain about a > > similar future non-font-oriented license. :-) > > > Since you both are having so much fun... here's my two cents ;) > > I agree this is ok for Fedora, but I also understand Richard's initial > hesitation re: the naming issue. > > I think the distinction is that > - the clause in Apache 2.0 is explicitly consistent with trademark law. > - whereas, this license sort of goes a step further and gives > instructions on how to change the name enough to avoid a "likelihood of > confusion" for the consumer (the standard for trademark infringement) > > Stating you must rename a modified version (or derivative work) is > pretty common, but generally still considered free/open as it is merely > reflecting the reality of trademark law (at least that's they way I > think of it). As I see it, there are plausibly-FLOSS licenses that attempt to contractualize/non-trademark-intellectual-property-license-ize policy concerns that have been traditionally associated with trademark law. This is not categorically problematic. For example the OSD says "The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software" and broadly speaking that seems to be a correct distillation of how the community has looked at this issue. But the question for me is how far or how much further can such a license provision go than what we assume is the background trademark law default for there to be a concern that the license is now too restrictive to be considered free/open source. I don't believe there is *no* such point at which a line is crossed. I think what makes me accept this license with some misgivings is (a) Ben's interpretation which is narrower than the one I initially had, and (b) it's a font license and there's a mostly unacknowledged lower standard applied to font licenses. So if this same provision appeared in a software license I am not sure it should be acceptable. Richard _______________________________________________ legal mailing list -- legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to legal-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
