Software Engineering Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professionals, academics, and students working within the systems development life cycle. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Recently I create a fork from an "open source project GPLv2" with different name. I make a major changes in source code and I gave a new name to the modified open source. I kept in the header of each source file the origin author copyright. And then I publish my new open source in github.
is this behavior is legal according to GPLv2 License statements ? do I have the right to change the name of the modified open source ? Could you please provide justification from licenses with the answer.
is this behaviour is legal according to GPLv2 License statements ?
Yes
do I have the right to change the name of the modified open source ?
Yes
Could you please provide justification from licenses with the answer.
A name change is just a modification to the source code (etc) that embodies the name, and modification of "the work" is one of many things that is permitted by the GPL (subject the rest of the license terms).
Besides, a restriction on renaming would go against the Four Freedoms.
In a comment, you say "the name is different!".
Yes and no.
Yes. A name can be trademarked. But trademark law does not prevent you from using a non-trademarked name ... unless it that one is sufficiently similar as to cause confusion. Trademark is about stopping the use of a word / name, rather than forcing its use.
No. A name cannot be copyrighted independently. It is too small to be considered copyrightable. Besides, if you replace a name with a different name, you are not copying the original one.
No. To the extent that the name is part of the copyrighted work as a whole, the GPL says you can modify the work; see above.
Standard disclaimers apply. IANAL.
I recommend that you take the time to read the GNU license itself, and the accompanying FAQs. The latter have been professionally translated into many languages ... probably including yours.
Open source licenses (including the GPLv2) give you the right to modify a program written by someone else and distribute your modified version. There are few restrictions in the modifications that you can make.
The most common restriction is that you can't remove or alter the copyright license.
I am not aware of any open source licenses that forbid renaming your fork. In many cases, it is rather the other way around and it is frowned upon to release a fork of an existing project under the same name, because it can create a lot of confusion among the users if it depends on where you got your copy from whether version 10.1 of product FOO contains feature X.
In fact, some open source projects use trademark protection on their name (for example firefox) to force forks to use a different name.
