[asterisk-biz] Digium's response to posting of G.729 and G.723 source code

[Shidan]

I honestly don't think these points would ever stand up in court. How can
you include something
and say you can use it and freely redistribute and in fact you can modify it
even as long as
you redistribute your modifications but then claim because of your trademark
your earlier statement is not valid.

It seems obvious to me that it would be contrary to any statements made in
the GPL if the entity in question demands  that you change the source code
to not mention your trademark . You have already said that you can use and
redistribute the product modified as long as you allow others to do so as
well. A trademark isn't meant to be used as a copyright,
its meant to preserve the right of the trademark holder to identify the
commercial source of a product or service.

So Redhat asking to not use its labels and designs on a web page  is fine
but you can't enforce a trademark on a running program you have released GPL
or words written in source code that's GPL, the fact that you give
permission to use and redistribute it
modified or not in the GPL would negate any rights you have to how the
source code or running program is changed or not changed as long as all
changes are shown in full and all proper credit is given. The GPL actually
partially serves the purposes of giving credit
always to the company or individual in question while giving free code.

---
Shidan Gouran

On 9/6/06, trixter aka Bret McDanel <trixter at 0xdecafbad.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2006-09-07 at 02:25 +0200, Patrick wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-09-07 at 11:31 +1200, James Jones wrote:
> > [snip]
> > >  Which, I
> > > fear, that mean Asterisk may be head the way of  Red Hat and going
> close
> > > sourced!!!!!
> >
> > Maybe you should do a little research before you and make bold blanket
> > statements (and top post). Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not closed
> > source. How could for example CentOS exist without the source? See:
> > ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/4/en/os/x86_64/SRPMS
> > Sure looks like *source* rpms to me...
> >
> > Patrick
>
> I think perhaps that the confusion exists because redhat embeds
> trademarked material in the product and while they give you exact
> instructions on how to remove that content so you can exercise your GPL
> rights without a lot of effort, you still cant redistribute their
> trademarks without their permission.  This caused a lot of bad feelings
> in the community.
>
> But then again there are companies that embed trademarked material in
> their product and dont provide such information on how you can exercise
> your GPL rights with the product without a lot of investment in time in
> hunting down everything to ensure compliance.
> http://www.digium.com/en/company/profile/trademarkpolicy.php
>
> Many in the open source community agree that this certainly goes against
> the spirit of the GPL, and in some cases against the wording since you
> dont have all the freedoms to edit and modify.
>
>
> --
> Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
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