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Comment by oddevan | Hacker News Reader

> No license is granted to the trademarks of the copyright holders even if such marks are included in this software.

This line was probably required to get some manager at Apple to sign off on this. There are few companies as protective of their trademarks--their _name_--as Apple, and they probably wanted to make sure that an accidental commit from a developer that included an Apple logo or the word 'iPhone' didn't cause irreparable damage to their trademark.

Valid fear? That's debatable. But I'd rather have a company add _one line_ to an already minimal license than not open source at all out of this fear.

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"This line was probably required to get some manager at Apple to sign off on this." I agree here :)

"Apple logo or the word 'iPhone' didn't cause irreparable damage to their trademark."

As I said, this is a problem either no company who uses the BSD license has or all of them have it.

"But I'd rather have a company add _one line_ to an already minimal license than not open source at all out of this fear."

I don't agree here at all. Because this is how we ended up with the mess that caused things like open source license certification by OSI to exist in the first place.

Random companies would add random one-liners to licenses, like "don't use in nuclear reactors", etc.

Down this path is madness, and it starts with good intentions.

It's probably a problem all of them have. Apple is just the only company that cares enough to make a big deal about it in advance, rather than imagining that they'll just let things slide for now and argue post-facto in some later court case that the license should be read as not granting trademarks.

In other words, this isn't like the nuclear reactors bit—this is something that could actually belong in the BSD license, and where when merging BSD-licensed software with Apple!BSD-licensed software, probably the Apple!BSD would keep winning, and the trait would end up at fixation, rather than "speciating" the license.

1. I strongly disagree with the idea that they are the only ones who would consider it a large deal enough to do something if it was a real fear. It's somewhat ridiculous to believe that, say, Google or Facebook, wouldn't do the same if they thought it was a concern.

2. The part about "having to argue post-facto" would be a valid line of argument if, as i pointed out, there wasn't already plenty of precedent that shows their fear is completely and utterly unwarranted.

In fact, i doubt they could even cite a single time a judge even considered this a non-crazy argument.

In other words, this in fact, is exactly like the nuclear reactors bit. It doesn't actually belong in the license, because if was a real concern:

A. There would be at least some case somewhere that concerneed folks.

B. After 20+ years of BSD licenses, it'd already be there

Unfortunately, that single line addition means that this code can't be used with other open source projects. It can't be combined with code released under the BSD, MIT, MPL, GPL or other OSI-certified open source licenses and kept under the same OSI license. This puts it more in the 'shared source' realm than the 'open source' realm.

Why exactly couldn't it be combined with those licenses?

The GPL forbids additional restrictions on code, so you can't legally combine something that is GPL with a restriction like this.

Adding something like this (that we'll call Apple BSD) to anything that is MIT/BSD would end up being Apple BSD, because you'd have to ensure this restriction is applied to the resulting product, over an above MIT/BSD.

So it's not actually incompatible with BSD/MIT.

As for the GPL, I think you missed section 7 - "Additional Terms":

Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms:

e) Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some trade names, trademarks, or service marks

If anyone's wondering, the GPLv2 is slightly less explicit: it doesn't directly state that it's strictly a copyright license rather than involving trademarks, but it's strongly implied, and has been treated as such in court, e.g. this from Germany:

http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=5b0c0785-3eac-...

It's incompatible with BSD/MIT in the sense that whatever you combine with this Apple-variant BSD becomes Apple-variant BSD and can't be straight BSD or MIT anymore. In that respect, GPL code is also compatible with BSD/MIT as it can legally be combined, it just becomes GPL and can't be licensed as BSD/MIT anymore either.

As for the GPL notice, I hadn't realized that was added in GPL3, so these additions by Apple would be allowable under GPL3. I don't use GPL3 so hadn't known about that, thanks for the heads up. They wouldn't be compatible with the more-popular GPL2 (Linux and everything else), though, which has no such allowances.

Correct, this is one of the few restrictions GPLv3 allowed.

But this text does not exist in GPLv2, so it may or may not be considered GPLv2 incompatible (I don't remember the FSF's last position on these clauses, because almost every other license that has them is gplv2 incompatible for other reasons)

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