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Drupal tm policy: now requires you to get a license just to use the word drupal
- teamonkey 17y agoA rather misleading title, IMO. Actually it's completely wrong.
- vaksel 17y agoyeah reddit sensationalism > me
- mbrubeck 17y agoNote that you are automatically granted a license for various always-okay uses, including fair use, use in source code identifiers, and various other pre-approved uses. There's a general problem for high-profile open source projects with valuable trademarks. Registering a trademark can be a useful measure to defend against lawsuits from other people who claim ownership of a mark, or to prevent abuses like companies misleading users by selling (fake) "official" Drupal support or licenses. But trademark law is very different from copyright law, and it's a lot harder to make trademark licenses compatible with software freedom. For example, you can let anyone modify and sell your copyrighted work while still retaining your own rights. But if you license your trademarks indiscriminately then you risk invalidating them. (This is because trademark law was originally intended to protect consumers by allowing them to trust that a mark was associated with a particular manufacturer.) Some projects like Mozilla and Drupal have dealt with this by creating legal licenses that attempt to balance community freedoms with the requirements of trademark law. When I worked on the Audacity project we registered our trademarks (mainly as a defensive measure after a company with a similar product started using the same name) but did not craft any explicit license. Most open source projects don't bother registering their marks at all, which is probably the best approach in most cases.