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

On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 12:52, 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.

...and, also, incompatible with the GPL.

Most of the Debian concerns, though, are that they want to patch the
software: their policy on security is that they will not ship a newer
version for a security issue, but rather will make the minimal patch
to their release version.

In the LaTeX case, of course, that means they are obligated to change
the name of the package in the security release, breaking the entire
world.  Boom.

(In the specific case, the trademark does require that you call your
project something else, or risk breaking the law if there was any risk
that your version and the original version might be confused.  Which
... there is. :)

Daniel
-- 
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