NCSA Open Source License

'Bruce Perens' bruce at perens.com
Fri Jan 18 00:13:36 UTC 2002


On Thu, Jan 17, 2002 at 02:38:20PM -0800, Lawrence E. Rosen wrote:
> Bruce, the so-called "advertising" clause in the Apache license is
> extremely important.  As I stated in one of my columns in Linux Journal,
> trademark protection is, in some respects, even more important to open
> source companies than copyright protection.

Hi Larry,

You saw "advertising", and read "trademark". But these are separable
issues.

I agree with you regarding the importance of trademark protection.
That's why I wrote the "integrity" provision in the OSD. The "obnoxious"
advertising clauses concern me, such as the _original_ BSD/Apache
advertising clause, which really is deprecated by both U.C. Berkeley and
the Apache project. Badgeware is even worse, because of its potential
combinatorial effect - 1000 badges on my homepage. OSI has (wisely)
resisted badgeware so far.

In accepting trademark-protecting licenses, the names of protected
trademarks should be in template form. Otherwise, you could easily
have to review and accept 500 versions of the Vovida license, with
only names varying between each version.

	Thanks

	Bruce
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