APL license - What about the enforced logos?

[Matthew Flaschen]

Rick Moen wrote:
> My first section, of necessity, has to be the part that explains
> Unauthorised Practice of Law statutes, accounting for why it's lawful for
> me to write about generalities, about past real cases, and about
> hypothetical cases such as the Suebob GNU/Linux distribution stupidly
> agreeing that the Big Lizard Foundation has the power to force them to
> rename the latter's Earthbadger Web browser, when it plainly lacks that
> power, and when there are perfectly obvious ways to disarm claims of
> trademark infringement in advance, in such cases.[1]
> 
> And I hope Scarlet Sombrero, Inc. won't take amiss the comments I have to
> make about CentralOS ignominiously wimping out upon the latter's receipt
> of a particularly feeble and laughable trademark demand letter.  ;->

I am very interested in that particular issue.  It seems to me that
they're relying on Latham "false designation of origin".  However, if
the origin is fully explained ("Compiled by CentralOS Foundation from
ScarletSombrero Enterprise Linux sources, after removing all
ScarletSombrero trademarks and images.  ScarletSombrero Enterprise Linux
and ScarletSombrero are registered trademarks of ScarletSombrero, Inc.")
this seems to void.

>> If they only understand that OSI is in charge, they will be forced to
>> check the website for each license.  This isn't reasonable, or likely in
>> practice.
> 
> That's exactly why there's an "OSI Certified" certification mark: 
> http://www.opensource.org/docs/certification_mark.php   Please do remind
> people about it!
> 

Unfortunately, this mark currently has far too many false negatives to
be reliable.  I do think distributors should be strongly encouraged to
use it.

Matt Flaschen

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