I was wondering if there is any reason for trademarked projects (themes, modules, distros) possibly being excluded from drupal.org. It is a given that anything distributed on drupal.org must be GPL2+ but I am wondering if it can be trademarked.
I have had a look around the various policy documents and see nothing relating to trademarked projects. Most materials discuss the GPL or the Drupal trademark itself. Are there any others?
Common practice seems to suggest that trademarked projects are distributed off site - this seems to be the case for distributions. See Open Atrium's terms of use. However, I believe Ubercart to be trademarked but it is distributed as a module on drupal.org. This makes me think that maybe it is possible. (NB. Ubercart may be a special case - no mention is made of the TM AFAICT).
Crell has noted elsewhere that he is "not sure off hand if there would be a trademark issue" if a distro was distributed on drupal.org. A related discussion addresses a similar issue with trademark with respect to Drupal TM and its status as GPL software. Crell states that "using a trademark on a thing to refer to that thing is not a violation of the trademark. We can freely discuss the software known as Drupal on this board". This would suggest that there is nothing stopping a trademarked project from being freely discussed by users who downloaded. So, using the Drupal TM approach, is there anything stopping other projects taking the same route?
I think that this is an important area to address because you will probably see a lot more projects wanting to TM as the momentum grows for business models based around GPL software. If TM projects are forced off drupal.org I can see that the module repository will become fractured as module copyright holders carve out niches off site.
Finally, for those who have their own trademarked projects off site, are there any reasons for making you distribute them this way given that you lose a lot of exposure not being on drupal.org.