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Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarksDebian and Mozilla - a study in trademarksPosted Jan 10, 2005 19:36 UTC (Mon) by josh_stern (guest, #4868)In reply to: Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks by piman Parent article: Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks
I can't see any apocalyptic conflict of principles here. DFSF #4 says that authors can require derived works to carry a different name. Debian itself would not allow an arbitrary derived work of Debian to still call itself Debian. Now add to the above the fact that Mozilla says that they like Debian's quality and they are willing to allow Debian to use their trademark. Debian can decide for itself whether they want to use the trademark even though they can not pass that ability onto their users, the quality of whose derivations they obviously cannot vouch for.
So Debian has these possibilities: 1) use Mozilla like any other package but give it some name variant indicating it has been modified, 2) use Mozilla and call it Mozilla but put it in non-free and indicate in the source distribution of their modified code that a further user-modified version should not be installed as Mozilla because that interferes with a trademark, 3) offer a choice between version "1)" in free and version "2)" in non-free, 4) make a different subset of non-free called "trademarked", recognizing that the legitimacy of this sort of restriction has already been coded into the DFSG.
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Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks Posted Jan 10, 2005 19:55 UTC (Mon) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] > 1) use Mozilla like any other package but give it some name variant indicating it has been modified
That's what the article is about. Did you read it? This is what Debian (and everyone else) will have to do to distribute Mozilla under the current policy.
But this is substandard for users. What value does the "Mozilla" mark have for anyone -- distributors, users, or the Mozilla Foundation -- when every Unix user uses the Iceweasel browser instead? The Mozilla Foundation needs to realize their management of the mark is hurting everyone.
Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks Posted Jan 10, 2005 20:08 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Why it's Ok for *TeX (plain TeX, LaTeX and so on have very strict regulations imposed on redistributors)and bad for Firefox ?
Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks Posted Jan 11, 2005 4:22 UTC (Tue) by goonie (subscriber, #4252) [Link] IIRC, TeX is treated as a special case by Debian developers, because it's been in Debian since day 1 (almost), and, well, it's by Don Knuth, sooper-genius.
Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks Posted Jan 13, 2005 17:49 UTC (Thu) by edgewood (subscriber, #1123) [Link] While both the Iceweasel and Community Edition options are arguably DFSG-free, they both present policy challenges. Iceweasel is the best option from a freeness perspective, but poses challenges to Debian users, since many inexperienced users may be confused by the name changes. On the other hand, Debian developers may not want to live with the restrictions of the community edition.TeX is different because 1) it has a much smaller user base than Mozilla, so a name change, if one were necessary, would have a smaller impact, and 2) a user who is experienced enough to even know what TeX is can probably handle a hypothetical name change.
Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks Posted Jan 20, 2005 13:33 UTC (Thu) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link] Also, something tells me TeX won't need any security fixes.. ;-)
Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks Posted Jan 10, 2005 20:18 UTC (Mon) by josh_stern (guest, #4868) [Link] I read the article and felt that - without saying anything false - it gave a false impression of serious conflict where no serious conflict exists. My range of suggestions is meant to show that there are multiple good possibilities. You may feel like "1)" is not a good possibility, but I doubt most people seriously care. Also, if making a symlink doesn't count as "distribution" then sysadmins can make symlinks called mozilla for folks that can't cope with deb-mozilla or iceweasel.
Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks Posted Jan 20, 2005 13:36 UTC (Thu) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link] I see a big difference in if I am allowed to make a MyOwnDebian fork or not. Mozilla forbids any name that contains the string "Firefox" so the normal rules does not apply.
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