Hacker News Reader

Comment by _b8r0 | Hacker News Reader

Er... It is FLOSS. The name isn't. You don't have to use it, you don't have to call it by name. You can call it 'Dave' and it's no different.

View on HN

The difference is that no one is going to start searching for "Dave consulting".

A lot of people run sites and businesses with "Drupal" in the name. For the last 8 years, nobody's had to worry about licensing issues. Now things seem to be changing, and it's not really clear why.

If I'm reading this right, "Dave does Drupal" is allowed.

read again:

A high-traffic website "drupalindepth.com" containing sponsored ads, qualifies for an automatic license when the profits generated from these ads (minus hosting costs and other obvious costs incurred for maintaining the website) are used to pay a full-time developer working on the new open source Drupal template engine.

And:

Example uses for which the license grant procedure must be followed:

* a commercial website hosted under domain name "commonusesofdrupal.com";

There's a difference. If you see the URL drupalindepth.com or commonusesofdrupal.com, you obviously should think "hey, this is about the Drupal software blah blah blah", while if you see davedoesdrupal.com, you should think "This is about what dave does with drupal", not "what drupal does in general". The first is allowed, the second isn't unless you have a license.

[Edit: IANAL]

Right. What if your project has been in existence for over a year and a half and you get this slightly game changing policy dumped on you ?

Change the name then. Its not like you've been building up a brand name with reputation if your project is just called Drupal-Something.

(I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, blah blah blah)

Apply for a license. As said, the goal of the policy is to create a fair-level playing ground for all people and organizations that are part of the Drupal community. If your use of the Drupal name is fair for others, if it does not suggest an official link with the Drupal project, and if you adhere to the Rules of Use, there shouldn't be a problem. In fact, the trademark policy helps protect your investment in Drupal because it avoids that others can use the name in ways that are unfair to you or your Drupal business.

The lack of a Drupal trademark policy doesn't mean the trademark was unprotected -- it was protected by trademark law. By creating a trademark policy and a licensing procedure, we've provided us options we did not have before. Things have become more permissive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com