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iolsantr | 11 years ago

If a project name was trademarked, you might be able to get them for trading on that name, maybe?

discuss

Maybe, but if they make it clear that they're not sponsored or endorsed by the project in question, it'd probably be considered nominative fair use, at least in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use

iolsantr|11 years ago

They are soliciting donations using the project name. I don't think that falls into nominative use. It'd be really weird if I could use the logo of the Salvation Army to solicit donations for my own organization even if I intended to give some of the donated money to them.

brador|11 years ago

Can you trademark open source project names?

JohnTHaller|11 years ago

Absolutely. Mozilla, Firefox, OpenOffice, Apache, Debian, etc are all registered trademarks and can not be used by others without permission.

chx|11 years ago

Hell yeah.

Drupal trademark policy http://drupal.com/trademark Apache trademark policy http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/ Eclipse trademark policy https://www.eclipse.org/legal/logo_guidelines.php KDE® and the K Desktop Environment® logo are registered trademarks of KDE e.V. can't find the policy right now.

pmh|11 years ago

I think so, yes. See Iceweasel[0], the custom Debian build of Firefox. I'm not sure that you'd be successful in using trademark law in this particular scenario though.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_re...

donaldr3|11 years ago

Yes, in fact GPLv3 specifically deals with trademarks in section 7e).