[License-review] Approval submission for the Qlovatech License

[Eric Schultz]

Quentin,

I'm not a lawyer but I'm not sure I understand the motivation here. A FOSS
project can protect their trademark right now and many do, like Mozilla
does for Firefox. Some FOSS foundations will attempt to enforce trademarks
on behalf of their member projects. Whether in a license or not, don't
trademarks still need to be enforced to be protected?

What is the urgent problem being appropriately solved here and why is it
something that is within the limits of the Open Source Definition?

Eric

On Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 1:01 AM Quentin Quaadgras <email at quentinquaadgras.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'd like the Open Source Initiative to consider approving the Qlovatech
> License. I have developed the license to fill a gap in the open source
> licensing sphere for use in projects I am developing that are intended to
> be open source and I want other developers to be able to adopt this license
> for their projects.
>
> International trademark protection is expensive and nothing stops a large
> company from taking an open-source project from a small to medium community
> and stealing the 'brand' and/or title of that project in order to make
> money from that brand. The Qlovatech license is a strong library-level
> copyleft license and is designed to automatically protect the brand and/or
> title of any project it covers, whilst preserving the rights of every user
> of the software. The author and any contributors to the project can be
> confident that the brand they establish for their project and/or the brands
> of any forks will not be exploited by other companies or organizations for
> commercial gain. Everyone has the right to create a new brand from their
> copy of the software, or to rename and/or rebrand the software so that it
> will be protected by this license.
>
> The Qlovatech License is attached in plaintext below and I believe that it
> is a special-purpose open-source license that meets the OSI's definition.
> The license fits somewhere between:
> The GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPL-3.0), the Artistic
> License 2.0, the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0) and the The 3-Clause
> BSD License (BSD3).
>
> I am aware that existing open-source licenses can have additional terms
> added to them in order to protect the Integrity of The Author's Source
> Code, however I wanted an open-source license that any developer can apply
> to their software without any license modification, so that it
> automatically protects their brand and the brand of any derivatives of that
> software. As far as copyleft goes, I wanted this to apply to the scope of a
> project/library rather than the entire program or to individual files. This
> allows the license to be a suitable choice for projects who want to leave
> the possibility open to be ported to proprietary platforms such as
> video-game consoles or vehicle displays but still want any extended
> functionality or bug fixes to be released in source-code form.
>
> The license hasn't gone through any legal review yet as I do not have the
> required funds to do so and I hope this doesn't block the approval process.
> I think a license like this is desperately needed by the open source
> community to address some of the issues behind why licenses such as the
> Server Side Public License were created. Please let me know if anything is
> unclear about the license and/or if you believe that it doesn't meet the
> OSI's definition so that I can take steps to clarify and/or adjust it.
>
> Best Regards,
> Quentin Quaadgras
>
>
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