NewsForge | Trademarks: A threat to free software's freedom?
It's not as though free software advocates had enough to worry about. We know how we feel about software patents and copyrights--but how about trademarks? Apparently, the Debian team is having some issues with Abiword since the latter secured some trademarks for its popular word processing program. What's your spin?
trademarks are nothing new
Linux itself is trademarked. So Debian's got an even bigger problem if trademarks are the issue.
The myth of the now
"AbiWord--now with trademarks": the title is highly misleading; the name AbiWord has _always_ been trademarked. The original TM holders were SourceGear Corporation, and the licence from the start stipulated that only the official and unmodified distribution could be called AbiWord. You could modify it to your heart's content (under GPL), but if you modified it, you could only call the result "AbiWord Personal" and could not use the the trademarked graphics with it. All that has changed is that the ownership of the trademarks has been transfered to the current AbiWord project manager (and even that has not happened now, but quite a while ago).
Trademarks have nothing to do with software freedom; they are about protecting the integrity of brands. AbiWord is a brand; I have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours working on AbiWord and I do not want to see the AbiWord brand damaged by someone forking AW and not acknowledging that what they distribute is not the brand. Software freedom is a freedom to fork, not freedom to impersonate.
Tomas