On Thu, Nov 11, 2021 at 11:59 AM Ben Cotton <bcotton(a)redhat.com> wrote:
On Thu, Nov 11, 2021 at 11:53 AM Richard Fontana <rfontana(a)redhat.com> wrote:
>
> I am not sure if this should be acceptable for Fedora. My concern is
> that the "UW" naming prohibition is unreasonably restrictive. Does
> anyone have thoughts on this?
>
I read it as being similar to section 6 of ASL 2.0:
> 6. Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names,
trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for
reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the
content of the NOTICE file.
But this would be like the Apache License saying "derivative works
can't have the consecutive letters 'AP' in their name". I'm not sure
at what point such a restriction becomes problematic from a FLOSS
standpoint but for example if it were one letter, like "U", that would
obviously not be okay. Two letters doesn't seem too different.
The closest parallel I'm aware of might be the PHP license, which
Fedora (following the FSF's view) treats as free but GPL-incompatible.
The main reason for the GPL incompatibility, I believe, is this naming
restriction:
"Products derived from this software may not be called "PHP", nor may
"PHP" appear in their name, without prior written permission from
group(a)php.net. You may indicate that your software works in
conjunction with PHP by saying "Foo for PHP" instead of calling it
"PHP Foo" or "phpfoo"".
Maybe that's the right call, as we've been assuming, but I wonder if a
two-letter sequence restriction goes too far.
It could be that the traditional view has been that any arbitrarily
restrictive renaming provision is okay from a libre standpoint. I'm
not sure why that should be correct though.
Richard