

Drupal tm policy: now requires you to get a license just to use the word drupal - vaksel
http://drupal.com/trademark

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mbrubeck
Note that you are _automatically_ granted a license for various always-okay
uses, including fair use, use in source code identifiers, and various other
pre-approved uses.

There's a general problem for high-profile open source projects with valuable
trademarks. Registering a trademark can be a useful measure to defend against
lawsuits from other people who claim ownership of a mark, or to prevent abuses
like companies misleading users by selling (fake) "official" Drupal support or
licenses.

But trademark law is very different from copyright law, and it's a lot harder
to make trademark licenses compatible with software freedom. For example, you
can let anyone modify and sell your copyrighted work while still retaining
your own rights. But if you license your trademarks indiscriminately then you
risk invalidating them. (This is because trademark law was _originally_
intended to protect consumers by allowing them to trust that a mark was
associated with a particular manufacturer.)

Some projects like Mozilla and Drupal have dealt with this by creating legal
licenses that attempt to balance community freedoms with the requirements of
trademark law. When I worked on the Audacity project we registered our
trademarks (mainly as a defensive measure after a company with a similar
product started using the same name) but did not craft any explicit license.
Most open source projects don't bother registering their marks at all, which
is probably the best approach in most cases.

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teamonkey
A rather misleading title, IMO. Actually it's completely wrong.

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vaksel
yeah reddit sensationalism > me

