NYCPHP Meetup

[Gary Mort]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 8:30 PM, Mitch Pirtle <mitch.pirtle at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> I'll weigh in on this one as I'm not exactly famous for not having an
> opinion. (cough)
>
>
:-)


> Trademark and copyright simply means OSM owns the name and logo. GPL
> however is a software license, which simply means you can do whatever
> you want with said software, as long as you comply with the GPL.
>
>
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
"“Copyright” also means copyright-like laws that apply to other kinds of
works, such as semiconductor masks." - nope, quite specific that it does not
apply to only the software, but to everything included in the package.

"To “modify” a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a
fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact
copy. The resulting work is called a “modified version” of the earlier work
or a work “based on” the earlier work."

Such as changing the logo included in the software in some manner. :-)

Though :
"e) Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some trade
names, trademarks, or service marks; or"

Does leave a lot of wiggle room....   Of course, the same wiggle room has
been used to include trademarked items which are then used by the program to
check for before being able to run.


Basically, what you have is a legal grey area.  It's so trivial no one
actually wants to go through the motions of having it decided by law....  So
the "rules of the road" are basically whatever the GNU.org asserts they
are...or whatever others get away with.


And again, GPL does insist that you can require your copyright notice on
your software...but the Joomla Team routinely removes those.  Hopefully with
permission.
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