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

Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

Posted Jan 11, 2005 15:04 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
Parent article: Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

It seems to me the Debian problem is much of a practical nature:
It is OK for changes to require other changes. For example the GPL states that changes must be compiscuously documented.

Basically it needs:
1) the right to distribute verbatim copy of packages
2) the right to make any modification with an 'acceptable' hassle.
3) The above hassle need to be predictable.

This means that peppering the code with trademarks so that removing them is very difficult is not DFSG free. Requesting to change one string to say 'non-official' instead of 'official' is DFSG-free.

Therefore the best option for the Mozilla foundation would be to make trademarked material a add-on package to apply on top of iceweasel to make it firefox. Debian would package them separatly with a suitable dependency. Debian-based distros can just omit the firefox package if they have made non-compliant change to iceweasel. Of course prepackaged version distributed by the Mozilla foundation will include the add-on.

This would also avoid any ambiguity about what is trademarked and let the Mozilla foundation show its good-will with modified versions (that the trademark is meant to secure quality not to bar people from distributing modified versions).

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