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

On Mon, 21 Nov 2011, Robin Paulson wrote:
> > I think that the GPLv3 allows that additional restriction, though, which
> > is strange; they call out that additional terms including "prohibiting
> > misrepresentation of the origin of the software" are permitted.
>
> in the specific case i brought up, there are further conflicts which i had
> not thought about before. the name of the project, zotero, is trademarked,
> but all parts of the project are released under free licences. the
> conflict is that some of the code uses the word zotero, and thus i suppose
> can't be redistributed without changes. similarly file and folder names,
> and the trademark owned by the various sponsors (a university and other
> similar academic groups) will be similar as it is embedded in various
> places such as the 'about' dialogue. apparently re-distributors are
> forbidden from bringing the name of sponsors into disrepute. also, there
> are icons and other images which contain the name of the project. so, it
> conforms to free software, but due to the trademark, we can't exercise all
> the rights given to us under that license.
>
> an odd anomaly, one strand of IP affecting another. i wonder what the
> complete, technical, legal stance is?

I believe that all versions of the GPL have has specific wording around
"aggregation" not being sufficient a "derivative work" to require all the
components to be GPL licensed.

It could be argued that the branded elements (images etc) are NOT GPL'ed,
they're just aggregated with GPL code.

Of course, keywords embedded in the middle of the code and forming an
integral part of an executable binary are likely to thwart that argument, in
which case I'd argue that Debian would be free to continue to use, say,
"$HOME/.mozilla" as the per-user directory for IceWeasel.

-Martin

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