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e7620 | 11 years ago
You got it backwards. Precisely only the big commercial distros with mighty legal teams (Debian, RedHat, Fedora) could afford to get away with violating the GPL, and stealing the name of the original project for the fork symlinks. Try to name your toy project something even remotely similar to redhat or debian and you'll be crushed like a bug.
Here I see powerful entities taking advantage of an individual hacker.
""" During the Debian project activity, the source code distributed by Debian was modified in a way that violates GPL and Copyright and makes it impossible to legally distribute this "fork" called "cdrkit". """
""" The GPL preamble (see also Urheberrecht §14 below) disallows modifications in case they are suitable to affect the original author's reputation. As Debian installs symlinks with the original program names and as many people still believe that the symlinks with the original program names are the original software, Debian does not follow the GPL.
GPL §2a requires to keep track of any author and change date inside all changed files. This is not done in the fork.
[...]
GPL §3 requires the complete source to be distributed if there is a binary distribution. The Debian fork tarball does not include everything needed to compile the cdrtools fork (complete source) and Debian does not give a written offer to deliver the missing parts. """
_delirium|11 years ago
In Debian's case at least, I don't think there's an objection to third-party projects or forks using names derived from the name "Debian", so long as they aren't actually identically the name "Debian". For example, there is a distribution called "Illumian" which is made up of the Illumos base OS and a Debian-derived userspace.
Besides, I don't really see a trademark issue here. The term "cdr" preexists both of the projects, and is owned by neither of them. A person named their software after a fairly generic derivative of this term, "cdrtools". And now they are complaining that someone else named their software a different generic derivative, "cdrkit"? Do they claim that nobody else should be able to use the prefix "cdr" followed by a noun? Given that they did not even invent the prefix "cdr", that seems like quit a stretch. That's like someone who named their backup product "Backup Tool" complaining that a different product is named "Backup Kit". Sorry, but you don't own the word "backup".
e7620|11 years ago