I really don't want to write reams on this topic, as it's a necessary evil rather than something I love doing. Also, the more I write on it, the more likely I am to fluff a line and get the wrong meaning, especially these days. I've checked the following twice, but excuse errors ;-) Rachel wrote:
I need some help on the whole "what license thing" - the situation I'm least keen on, is say the "egg" being associated with some other product/company name - ie becoming dissociated from Koha and attached to something else. IS that covered by the GPL type license?
No. If it's another library system which is attempting to pass itself off as koha, then it may be a fraud (legal name varies between jurisdictions). You can register a trademark to make it simpler, but there are two large gaps which many people don't seem to notice: 1. For free software like koha, anyone can use the trademark as long as it's an honest description of the origin of the goods - that is, they are actually distributing something based on koha. This is the same rule that allows used car dealers to advertise MGs as MGs. 2. For other things like a hockey club, they could use it because the field of a trademark is usually declared at registration and koha isn't related to hockey or anything similar. I haven't looked at non-English trademark law, but I expect similar things exist in many places. One can use copyright licensing to prevent both of those uses, but you have the same arguments as against forbidding copying of programs. I hope most of koha-devel see giving some copyright permission is A Good Thing. On the shoulders of giants and all that. They might do a really great version of it and then we might want to use that. Logos often seem to be restrictively licensed and, to be honest, I think it's a massive pain in the backside. Just look at all the trouble that the Mozilla Foundation logos are causing, or even debian's own "open use" logo. Fortunately, the debian one is being fixed (slowly). If a logo is released as free software, you have difficulty restricting its use. That's just as bad/good as the rest of the system. I guess I think you're a bit paranoid ;-) Really, what harm would a hockey team using the logo do? Other firms pay good money to sponsor sports clubs. As far as software goes, koha is probably as protected as possible. We can register trademarks, but then you have overhead to enforce it if you want to keep the registration active (as if you don't challenge known unlicensed use then some jurisdictions see it as abandoning the trademark, I'm told). Do we really want legal work just to stand still? Putting the logo under the same licence as the rest of the system would at least keep things as simple as they are. I think asking people to improve ugly logos is fine, but it would be a bit scary if you can force them or else put them in court. MJR/slef PS: Creative Commons licences are not free software licences. Avoid. PPS: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but I have been contributing to debian-legal for a few years, mostly sanely. I was cautioned for copyright infringement by a past employer and after that, I thought I'd learn some. I know even less non-English law.