The new Trademark Clause

[sr229]

As you may have noticed we added a new trademark clause that prevents the use of the trademark, or the names of the contributors without prior permission. We understand this is remarkably close to the Mozilla Firefox clause, but we'll clarify what we want to protect here.

We want to protect against misrepresentation

On the wake of the Streamlabs incident, it was inherently clear that the current legal infrastructure to protect open-source projects from misrepresentation has been insufficient, due to this, we've made a lot of aggressive changes to counter this. It was clear that despite our copyleft protection, it cannot prevent reusing the name of the project and our authors against viral reuse of the source code and the brand of the project.

Therefore, we've taken steps to re-license our first-party projects to Microsoft Reciprocal License too, to prevent unauthorized use of the name and added a new trademark clause on our GPL license to prevent this from happening.

This does not mean we prevent you from forking it however!

This is intended to protect Vignette itself and our contributors from misrepresentation. But we still want to protect the open-source nature of the product, so we're only holding close the brand and trademark of the project, however in the end of the day, we still use OSI-approved licenses that upholds the Open Source Definition. We will not use licenses that will prevent these freedoms from being enforced and enacted.