Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks [LWN.net]

Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

Posted Jan 10, 2005 21:17 UTC (Mon) by piman (subscriber, #8957)
In reply to: Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks by josh_stern
Parent article: Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

It's stupid because it means no one can use the name "Mozilla", so there's no impression of the product. If anything, "Mozilla" will come to mean the upstream tree without the bug fixes, security updates, and new features (critical features for Unix systems, like multiuser support) -- "Mozilla" will come to mean "crap". No one wins in this case -- distributors have more work, users get confused, and the quality associated with the Mozilla name degrades.

The Mozilla Foundation is succumbing to a totally unfounded fear. "Linux" is a trademark but doesn't have a restrictive license. "GNOME" and "KDE" don't have such licenses. Most projects don't have trademarks at all. Why Mozilla (and a small handful of other projects, like AbiWord) feel they need this "protection" eludes me.

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Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

Posted Jan 10, 2005 22:03 UTC (Mon) by josh_stern (guest, #4868) [Link]

"It's stupid because it means no one can use the name "Mozilla", so there's no impression of the product. If anything, "Mozilla" will come to mean the upstream tree without the bug fixes, security updates, and new features"

We are talking about the same Mozilla and Debian? Mozilla the open source project that anyone can volunteer to join? With developer forums, bugzilla, talkback, frequent releases, etc? Debian the distribution that releases a stable branch every 3 years or so? I guess it is obvious to you that the only way to get bug fixes and features into Mozilla is to use the Debian developers version, but you are going to have to walk me through the logic.

Sarcasm aside, people who don't like their development tree are free to fork it. Feeling a need to fork it and yet still call it Mozilla is just silly. Remember "gcc 2.96"? That was basically just a snapshot and look how much hell it caused.

Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

Posted Jan 10, 2005 22:30 UTC (Mon) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link]

The word "Debian" did not appear in the post you replied to. This policy affects everyone who wants to distribute Mozilla with modifications -- that is, almost everyone who wants to distribute Mozilla.

While GCC 2.96 caused problems, I think you underestimate how much software you get from your distributor is not in its pristine upstream form. Upstream Mozilla does not feature real multiuser support, for example. Pretty much every GCC, glibc, and kernel you get is hacked in numerous places by your distributor. GNOME and KDE get obvious distributor-specific modifications. Unmodified upstream source for large projects is the exception rather than the rule.

Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

Posted Jan 10, 2005 23:50 UTC (Mon) by josh_stern (guest, #4868) [Link]

> The word "Debian" did not appear in the post you replied to.

Debian was a central topic in the post where you originally called the Mozilla policy "stupid". More importantly, I'm a Debian user and I appreciate the quality of their improvements to many packages, and the way that many of them are customized to Debian. But I also recognize a substantial difference between the development process of Mozilla and that of many typical upsource software projects included in Debian. Debian is one example of somebody who wants to make changes and its apparently an example where Mozilla will allow them to call the changed version Mozilla, Thunderbird, etc. So Debian is not an example of Mozilla's policy causing them problems.

Mozilla is worried about protecting themselves from inappropriate use and Debian is worried that at some point in the future, Mozilla might, at least theoretically, ask Debian to (gasp!) call the package by a different name if they don't see eye to eye with the changes. Mozilla's worry seems more serious.

Wrong conclusion

Posted Jan 12, 2005 12:11 UTC (Wed) by filipjoelsson (subscriber, #2622) [Link]

You say:
"It's stupid because it means no one can use the name "Mozilla", so there's no impression of the product."

This is wrong: As long as you distribute Mozilla as released by the Mozilla Foundation, you may use the name "Mozilla". If you want to make some small adjustments, you can still call it "Debian Mozilla, the Community edition".

They use the trademark to guarantee the official versions. One reason is to get an effective legal weapon fighting entities that would like to plant malware/spyware and pass it off as Mozilla.

As long as you don't expect every user to eyeball the software, it is a good idea to think a bit about what you do to protect your users from security problems. Otherwise Free software could get a really bad name, really fast - if eg a semi-official Mozilla was subverted.