2005/10/11, Michael K. Dolan Jr.
Guys, LOGOS AND TRADEMARKS (Trademark Law) cannot be GPL'd (Copyright Law). They will always be owned by an entity and under Trademark law, that owner MUST enforce compliance or else they loose their rights to the trademark. (See all the Australian / use of Linux press articles, Linus' explanation, etc). It's a simple matter of protecting the names/trademarks. So for instance, MSFT can't start distributing Suse Linux next week - something the trademark owner would obviously like to protect/prevent.
Take a look at Whitebox Linux: They take Red Hat's distro, strip the logos/trademarks, and repackage it. It's that simple. This is no different with Suse than with Red Hat or Ubuntu or Gentoo (yes, Ubuntu/Debian/Gentoo all own their trademarks and are no different). Why is this so difficult to understand? It does not prevent you from doing anything but violate Novell and Suse's trademarks. Meaning, you cannot sell Novell branded CD/DVD's to a company using Novell's name and Trademarks.
So no, you will never see anything in the GPL that affects trademark law protected things like Logos. It just can't/will never happen. The OSS Distro has only GPL/FOSS licensed works as far as I've read so there should be no problems here - just don't infringe on the marks.
And no I do not work for Novell/Suse. I'm just calling it as it is.
Ok, but I have never see that probed in court, have you ? And if not probedit in court at least it should be written in some place, it is ?? For example what you call logos trademark I can easily called art work. What you are saying is that I can't sell a CD and called SUSE or Novell, I agree with that, but what about the SUSE and Novell logos that come inside the cdrom in a GPLd package, package that have been gpld for SUSE/Novell it self. -- Marcel Mourguiart