I installed NeoOffice/J today – the OpenOffice for OSX that does not require X11. The following note was a bit disappointing. It seems like they’re using trademarks as a way to push something, but I don’t really see the benefit for them. All it does, as far as I can tell, is reduce the freedom the GPL v2 gives you.
Not nice.
Distributing Copies of NeoOffice/J
Since NeoOffice/J is an open-source project staffed by volunteers and funded by donations, we encourage users to make and distribute copies of this distribution. You may even sell copies of this distribution *as long the sales price is less than or equal to the cost to produce and deliver the distribution*. In other words, our goal is to make NeoOffice/J available at little or no cost to all Mac OS X users so making a profit from sales of NeoOffice/J is prohibited.
Additionally, all copyrights for the NeoOffice/J logos and other NeoOffice-related images are reserved by their respective owners and may not be redistributed except under the terms of the “no-profit” restriction described above.
For those of you that are familiar with the GNU General Public License (GPL), this may seem inconsistent with the GPL. However, it is not inconsistent. While the GPL gives you the right to copy, modify, and redistribute the NeoOffice/J source code, the GPL does not cover trademark usage. Since NeoOffice is a registered trademark, use of that trademark is not covered by the GPL. So, if you copy, modify, or redistribute the code or binaries with the NeoOffice trademark, you must comply with the “no-profit” restriction described in the preceding paragraph. Note that if you remove all references to the NeoOffice trademark from your redistribution, you are not subject to the “no-profit” restriction and you will only be subject to the terms of the GPL.
Update:
I seems that Red Hat is doing the same thing: The license points to their trademark information page, where they say such things as: “Without waiving any of its rights, Red Hat does not advise others on the scope of its intellectual property rights.” And here is how they reduce the quality of our freedom:
If Customer makes a commercial redistribution of the Software, unless a separate agreement with Red Hat is executed or other permission granted, then Customer must modify any files identified as “REDHAT-LOGOS” and “anaconda-images” to remove all images containing the “Red Hat” trademark or the “Shadowman” logo. Merely deleting these files may corrupt the Software.
So yes, you do have all the freedoms free software gives you, but trademark issues force you to edit an unknown amount of source before being able to enjoy your freedom.
It is damn *annoying*.
Of course, free software does not mean you have to be nice.
But I want people to be nice. To make it easy for me to exercise my rights. Right now they are mixing up the freedom the license intents to give you with the restrictions trademarks allow them to impose on you.
Debian is nicer, in this respect:
We allow all businesses to make reasonable use of the “Debian” trademark. For example, if you make a CD of our Debian GNU/Linux distribution, you can call that product “Debian”. If you want to use the name in some other way, you should ask us first.
#Software
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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I was looking for information on these restrictions on free software packages and distributions (particularly RedHat) with in the last 3 months.
Mozilla Firefox is also following along a similar path. I recently tried documenting it on Mozilla Public License¹ in their silly NPOV.
Stallman has said that Firefox gives an end user license agreement on installation that is proprietary in nature. I don’t have any reference, sorry.
Whither free software.
– AaronHawley 2005-12-13 04:33 UTC