Common Neutral Hypervisor? Trademarks and the GPL
I love Free Software. Like many free software developers, I'm rather concerned about the recent debates regarding the role of trademarks and free software. Just five years ago, the idea that trademarks would be a problem with free software was almost laughable. With high profile projects like Firefox developing questionable trademarking policies, the question of how trademarks affect free software is becoming very important.
As I write this, there's a heated debate within the Xen community over XenSource's new trademark terms specifically regarding the Xen trademark. Suffice to say, that the terms concern RedHat enough that they've announced that they're considering renaming Xen to CNH, or Common Neutral Hypervisor. They appear to be concerned that they can not live up to the trademarking terms.
Personally, I'm not in a position to comment about the new trademark policy. I try to keep my nose clean of this sort of thing. However, it's times like this that I realize how important the GPL is in defining what free software is and how lost we would be without it (or at least, how much arguing there would be). I wonder if there's enough room in the GPLv3 process to introduce trademark terms...
posted by Anthony Liguori at 7:35 PM
2 Comments:
I don't see that as an attack on free software. Rather, it is a rightful move to protect own work and reputation. I wrote my view on that here.
Personally, I think that extreme intepretation of GPL and "freedom" by some individuals and FSF is starting to hurt the Open Source community.
Trademarks are tough. On the one hand, you have to enforce them to maintain them. You really want to maintain them too to prevent serious abuse.
On the other hand, I don't think it's fair to simply say that any trademark licensing terms are fair insofar. An extreme example, would be a trademark license that said something like, in order to use the term Firefox, you aren't allowed to distribute the source code.
This obviously directly conflicts with the GPL and not being a lawyer, I have no idea how the two things interact with each other.
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