[Pkg-cups-devel] Trademark issues with renaming Debian's cupsys to cups?

[Michael R Sweet]

Martin Pitt wrote:
> Hi Mike,
> 
> I just got a request from Till Kamppeter [1] to rename the
> Debian/Ubuntu "cupsys" package to "cups", so that existing
> documentation ("install this package", "run /etc/init.d/cups", etc.),
> and LSB printer driver packages would work, and future LSB
> specification could even rely on package and init script names.
> 
> I wholeheartedly agree that it would be so much nicer to use the
> standard upstream project name.
> 
> Jeff Licquia now pointed out why "cupsys" was introduced in the first
> place [2] back in 1999: There were concerns that patches introduced in
> Debian would violate the trademark "cups".

FWIW, I never understood this, especially when the rest of the
trademarked content (logo, etc.) was retained.

> We still have some patches and always will have. Most of them fix
> packaging issues, or are small additions which got refused upstream,
> such as support for pid files. The only big change we have is the
> backport of the pdftops filter from cups' 1.4 trunk. If you are
> interested, I'm happy to give you a rundown of the current patches in
> a followup email.
> 
> So I am interested whether the concern about trademark violation is
> actually justified under these circumstances. Is there a more
> detailled statement about this somewhere, or what is your current
> opinion on this?

The whole reason for the trademark statement back in 1999 was to avoid
having a third-party take CUPS, fork it, and then market it using the
same name (causing confusion, giving us a bad name, etc.)

Every Linux and BSD distribution (and Solaris, for that matter) that
includes CUPS also applies patches to the source - we expect a certain
amount of that when you need to support unique functionality or want
to tweak the default configuration we provide - all of that falls under
the permissions granted in the license file:

     You may use these names and logos in any direct port or binary
     distribution of CUPS.

However, if you took the CUPS source code and made major changes to
it (e.g. stopped using IPP, changed the command-line arguments for
filters, etc.) which made the derivative incompatible with the
standard CUPS release, we'd expect you to use a different name and
update the documentation and web interface to reflect that your
version was a derivative and not the original.

If the Debian legal folks want an official statement from Apple legal,
I'll make the necessary introductions.  However, IMHO it isn't
necessary because what Debian is doing in its packages is explicitly
allowed by the license agreement.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael R Sweet                        Senior Printing System Engineer