On Monday 23 October 2006 00:29, Peter Flodin wrote:

You do realise that for all GPL software you have explicit permission from Novell, in writing, to copy and distribute verbatim copies.

Where do you see this?

If Novell has included their trademarks that does not restrict your rights under the GPL, if Novell is claiming anything else they are in breach of the GPL, as it does not allow anybody to impose restrictions on recipients exercise of the rights granted by the GPL.

This is wrong. Trademarks have nothing whatever to do with copyright, no copyright license can ever give you the right to use a trademark. In fact, companies *have* to protect trademarks, or they will lose them. Red Hat does the same in their packages (witness the repackaging effort done by CentOS) You also can't redistribute firefox and call it firefox without permission from mozilla (witness the Debian debacle). There is a special compilation switch in firefox that will remove all instances of the name "firefox" from the program You also can't redistribute Debian stuff using the name "Debian" without permission from Debian Trademarks are wildly different from copyrights, copyrights always apply no matter what, but trademarks have to be defended or you will lose them. So no, having to purge the software from Novell trademarks is not a GPL violation --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org