Re: [OS:N:] Another question about Licenses

[Konstantin Riabitsev <icon phy duke edu>]

On Fri, 2003-11-07 at 22:41, Anthony Saffer wrote:
> I can see your point. I suppose my biggest concern is that of the problems
> that might arise from our customers buying the software from us, having it
> modified by someone else, then expecting us to support those modifications.

When you write a support contract with a company (support is not covered
by the GPL, as it has only to do with software itself), you can
specifically say that you will only support the versions of software
that your company provides. Any modifications will either void the
support contract, or completely indemnify you of any responsibility you
have allowed yourself when providing the support contract (GPL
specifically states that there is no warranty or responsibility of
anytihing, so the default is "if it breaks, it's not my fault"). If you
do the latter, you can still make money on fixing broken modifications,
but you protect yourself from being sued.

> When things went wrong,
> they blamed the company  because when they did a search for the product name
> only the companies name came up. I, obviously want to avoid this.

You can trademark the name. Trademarks are not against the GPL. If you
call your software "the Foomaker" and trademark it, then people are
still free to redistribute the source, but they cannot call it "the
Foomaker." They can call it "the Maker that is Foo," or "Very Much Like
the Foomaker" or "the Barmaker," but that's it. This is the reason for
the existence of the "Pink Tie" distribution that is the rebranding of
Red Hat Linux, and largely the reason for "the Fedora Core"
distributions. Red Hat wanted all of its trademarks removed from the
free version of the OS, so people are free to make as many copies as
they like and redistribute them.

The trademark thing is done all the time in the world of products. E.g.
you can buy Dr.Pepper(tm), or you can buy Dr.Perky, which tastes very
similar to Dr.Pepper(tm), comes in a can that is very similar to
Dr.Pepper(tm), but nonetheless is not Dr.Pepper(tm), and if someone gets
stomach ulcers from drinking Dr.Perky, they will likely not confuse it
with Dr.Pepper(tm).

Regards,
-- 
Konstantin ("Icon") Riabitsev
Duke University Physics Sysadmin