On Fri, Nov 12, 2021 at 11:52 AM Jilayne Lovejoy <jlovejoy(a)redhat.com> wrote:
On 11/11/21 9:35 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 11, 2021 at 2:59 PM Ben Cotton <bcotton(a)redhat.com> 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