Legal

Hi all,

I just found that a Japanese company started selling Drupal-based site building service under a different name than Drupal. They call the system "System B", because they concluded the name "Drupal" will not be accepted by Japanese market.

I wonder if this act is acceptable and would like to hear other people's opinions, especially ones from those with legal knowledge.

This is in context with third-party commercial Drupal templates/modules/extensions available from popular vendors e.g. TemplateMonster.

Drupal is licensed under GPL 2. And according to GPL 2 terms, no software based-off a GPL 2 software can be sold, or any restrictions placed on its redistribution.

Any according to GPL 2 terms, Drupal modules and themes are based-off Drupal (because they interact with Drupal).

Most of such vendors sell Drupal modules/themes with single-site/domain license. So, I have 2 questions here:

I'd like to announce that I applied for trademark registration of Drupal in Japan.
Japan's trademark system is first come first served basis so my application will be accepted in few months (unless somebody else had already applied for it before me).
I have already sent an email to Mr. Dries Buytaert to tell him I did it.

The reason I did it is because I believe Drupal program belongs to the contributers and nobody has a right to block or intervene their business opportunities even in overseas.

Can contributed modules contain non-GPL data (other than css and images)?

I have a module to contribute that creates and populates a taxonomy vocabulary. Can the vocabulary terms be distributed under a different license than the code? Could that license also cover the vocabulary terms as a group after installation?

Thanks.

Hi!

Is it legal to have subscription based web site built on Drupal? I won't distribute anything by will have users visit the site.

Any idea?

I'd like to release a couple of themes through d.org. All my themes are built using Eric Meyer's browser reset stylesheet which is in the public domain. I'm also thinking about incorporating public domain images in my themes, such as photographs from the NASA archives. At the same time I'm aware of the restriction that only GPL'd files are allowed into the repository. What am I to do?

It took several iterations and various lawyers but here is another draft of what will become the Drupal Trademark Policy. We did our best to incorporate many of the suggestions that were provided in response to the previous draft. As a result, this is a substantial update and I encourage you to read it carefully.

There is an old issue in the docs queue (http://drupal.org/node/219053) about upgrading the CC license from 2.0 to 3.0. I'm not sure a) whether it is needed or b) if we could legally do it. Feedback one way or the other would be great so we can close that issue.

We have created a fairly involved Drupal distribution that we use to build client sites. Currently we are using the database copy method to start new sites. We have been working on a true installation profile so the recipe can be distributed the Drupal community.

A lot of work has gone into this and the main thing we want to avoid is someone taking all this work and claiming it as their own. Basically, we want to maintain attribution back to the authors.