On Tue, Sep 2, 2025 at 5:38 PM Steve Litt <slitt@???> wrote:

>
> I sell books. Let's say I used the GPL 2 or GPL 3 license on my books.
>

Actually, the 24 books in the Bruce Perens Open Source Series are under an
Open Publication License
and I think you can still find the PDFs online.
At the time, people were willing to pay for print copies. Today, I'd do it
with timing - since the book
is most in demand for a short period after publication.


>
> If I want to sell copies of their software, I cannot use their names,
> and probably anything suggestive of their names, and the closer I get
> to their names, the more likely I get sued by a pretty big entity.


Yes, but not really relevant. You are well able to establish another brand.

>
> I suppose I could start selling Alladin software


It's Alladin Ghostscript. Or today, Artifex Ghostscript, because Peter
retired with all the money he made
and took up his ambition of being a music composer, selling the company to
Artifex. Not a bad outcome.
I ran into him a few years back and heard some of his music.

it's a pretty hard marketing climb to popularize under that name.


I would call this putting in a fair amount of work to develop a brand. You
don't have a right to the original brand, because the purpose of the brand
is to identify the
*origin* of the product and that it is the version of that origin, not
simply the product. As it happens, there are a number of products based on
commerciallly-licensed
Ghostscript with well-developed brands that are not "Ghostscript".

But the entire story you've composed is analogous to Oracle MySQL and
MariaDB. Oracle owns most of the product and it's been released in the past
under GPL, so that's the version MariaDB is based upon. MariaDB is a viable
brand that they developed. The last time I spoke with Monty, they were
doing fine.

    Thanks

    Bruce