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

On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 9:52 AM, Jethro Carr <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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.

Think Redhat|Centos.

Centos bit compatible, but without the trademarks.

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