Re: adding and forking someone else's GPL software - what should i do?

On Mon, 2011-11-21 at 08:07 +1300, Volker Kuhlmann wrote:
> On Mon 21 Nov 2011 07:29:49 NZDT +1300, Robin Paulson wrote:
> 
> > reading the GPL, i don't see anything i am obliged to do, but i may
> > be wrong in my interpretation.
> 
> You are correct, you *need* to do nothing. Not even change the name. A
> while back the LaTeX people made their license to allow everyone to do
> everything one expects to be able to do with FOSS, except that they
> also
> mandated that forks change the package name to stop all hell breaking
> loose. Very sensible, but you wouldn't believe the number of militant
> screaming idiots over this (all from debian.org btw!) who saw their
> freedom infringed... 


It's actually not an unreasonable concern raised by Debain.

The problem with mandating a requirement to change the application name
upon a fork, is that if a distribution like Debian patches the
application (eg backports a bug fix, does a security fix, etc), that
patched version is now arguably a fork.

As a developer, I wouldn't want someone forking JethrosAwesomeApp,
making poor quality changes and releasing with that same name. But at
the same time, I don't want all the distros shipping it under a
different name because my terms were too restrictive - a different name
confuses users and makes it hard to find.

It's a hard balance to get right - ideally need some terms which are
"you are free to patch this application with fixes and minor
adjustments, but any major changes require a forked name". However this
is too vague and too open to different interpretations.


I've typically just added a request in the copyright explaining the
above or in some cases, the app name is trademarked and I detail
reasonable trademark usage terms, but it's not ideal.

regards,
jethro

-- 
Jethro Carr
www.jethrocarr.com
www.amberdms.com

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