nilshi wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 3:58 pm
I do not have a trademark. I just have copyright on my logo, because I created it. And on the name of course.
It's cool, I am not saying you should relinquish it
It's just that some repositories have policies which require all files of a program to be released under free licenses, such as Debian (
source, question 10).
I actually have no problems distributing images under the CC By-ND license. Nearly all music I listen to, books I read and movies I see are released under a far stricter license. However, that does limit the mobility of the software.
What you want to do is OK - claiming sole ownership of a software is a way to assure its quality in theory. But copyright law is not made for that, copyright is meant to limit the rights to copy something. What protects a "brand" is actually a trademark. I know you don't have one but I think it would be the best thing for the project if you registered trademarks for all the names and logos and released all files, including the images, under free licenses. This is what big projects like Ardour do.
The CC By-ND does not grant any of the protections of a trademark, anyway. People can legally fork Patroneo, call it Patroneo and put your logo on it, the license actually allows it!
The By-ND clause means that they must say you are the original author. If they do and leave the logo unchanged, they haven't made a derivative work and they can legally use your branding.
You say in the license file:
These and the name of the program itself cannot be reused when forking and re-releasing.
Well, that's what trademark is for, not copyright
The CC By-ND does not cover that and I am not sure that in all jurisdictions the license terms would apply to a trademark. Why would there be registered trademarks, then?
As a matter of fact, the US copyright website is clear that you cannot copyright a name (
source). Now, I know you are not from the US (neither am I) but that means that your terms would be hard to enforce there, for example, where a lot of users live.
So what I am asking you is: please, reconsider shipping nonfree files, which negatively affect the project's status as FLOSS in some venues, thus its popularity. The current terms sadly achieve nothing and to achieve what you want, a (sadly, costly) registered trademark is needed. If you can't afford to register those trademarks, you can just leave your "no forks with the same name" clause (even if it might be not legally binding because it's not a trademark, it's enough to deter) and remove the CC By-ND license since, as we've seen, it does not actually prevent people from making a fork of your programs using your branding.
Even if you don't, thank you for listening