Re: [Gnu-arch-users] re: licensing question

[Andrew Suffield]

On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 09:58:42AM -0800, Thomas Lord wrote:
> * 2nd Violation: Failure to Distribute Source in the Preferred Form
>                  and/or Illegally Distributed Derived Work
> 
>    GPLv3 will apparently *clarify* but it has always been true that
>    the GPL requirements to distribute source mean that source must
>    be distributed in the preferred form for modifications and 
>    redistribution.   For example, you can not obfuscate the source
>    and claim to have obeyed the GPL.
> 
>    The website for Centos reports that they must modify packages from
>    Red Hat to remove "upstream vendor branding and artwork".

Okay, this is unrelated to your other point.

It's actually not a new issue. When I was involved with debian-legal,
we saw this come up from time to time. I believe the first case was
mozilla.

As to the question of whether or not it's a GPL violation - it was our
considered opinion that this is unclear. Someday, somebody will take
it to court and find out. The arguments for both sides are "legally
plausible". Only the courts can decide which one is *right*.

We did not consider it to be congruent with the spirit of free
software.

We thought that it was most likely a DFSG violation, but the efforts
of the anti-freedom trolls inhibited our attempts to get anything done
about this. It's difficult to get upstream authors to fix these
problems when you have other people running around claiming that
debian-legal is wrong and has no authority to say anything.

However, mozilla were notable in having some cooperative people
working there who saw our point. As a result, all the mozilla products
are now arranged such that by default, if you build the source they
provide you get a binary produced that does not include any of their
trademarked branding. They even produced a set of 'community' artwork
that could be used without restriction, and does not include things
like the trademarked mozilla firefox logo.

The binaries you download from mozilla.com have their trademarked
branding. Everybody else uses the community stuff (supposedly).

And we thought that was an acceptable model for people to use. A
number of other projects have done similar things following
debian-legal's advice.