Interesting conversation, but I think it will work out OK [LWN.net]

Interesting conversation, but I think it will work out OK

Posted Jan 11, 2005 18:12 UTC (Tue) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)
In reply to: Interesting conversation, but I think it will work out OK by kimoto
Parent article: Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

Is it really necessary to define a generic policy that Debian must follow for every trademark holder who manages their marks the way Mozilla Foundation is doing? Since the legality is not a question, but only the process, there is no reason not to examine each case individually, taking into account the upstream authors. I'm also not interested in arguing about theoretically possible but wildly improbable situations: the idea that MF would make a request like this of Debian, _especially_ when dealing with a security patch, is completely unrealistic. In fact, the threads on debian-legal raised this very point and MF stated that the terminology about patching, etc. is not intended to cover security fixes. Possibly that's something Debian and MF would want to make part of some kind of agreement, if it's a worry for some.

Anyway, in answer to your question, IF something like this happened then obviously Debian would have to create an "iceweasel" release and, as you say, release a new deb that forced the upgrade.

Note, however, that this work will have to be done ANYWAY, right now, if Debian should decide the CE is not acceptable: Debian already provides a firefox package after all. Personally I'm more of a fan of the XP development model; of KISS; of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"; etc. Don't make work for yourself now just because there's an extremely unlikely possibility you might need it in the future.

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Interesting conversation, but I think it will work out OK

Posted Jan 11, 2005 20:40 UTC (Tue) by kimoto (subscriber, #5244) [Link]

As far as I can tell, it's not clear whether the MF intends to restrict the use of the command name "firefox" (and whether trademark law allows them to). So you could have breakage because the command name stops working.

Also, there is no firefox in a stable Debian release (for the obvious reasons ...), and it is considered no problem for packages to disappear from unstable. This has already happened: the "mozilla-firebird" package has come and gone.

Interesting conversation, but I think it will work out OK

Posted Jan 12, 2005 2:35 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

I also don't know if MF intends to/is able to restrict the name of the program on the disk. Seems doubtful to me but you never know. Even if they could restrict the filename, it's hard for me to believe they could restrict Debian from installing a "/usr/bin/firefox" symbolic link to "iceweasel".

Anyway, if the worst came true and the word "firefox" could not appear anywhere on the system, that would of course be annoying. However most applications use (or should use!) Debian's alternatives capability to invoke the browser, which would make any such transition seemless.

symlink is no different

Posted Jan 14, 2005 1:01 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

Even if they could restrict the filename, it's hard for me to believe they could restrict Debian from installing a "/usr/bin/firefox" symbolic link to "iceweasel".

I can't imagine that trademark law or the Mozilla license would restrict the file name but not an alias for that name. It's like saying you can put "Microsoft Office" on your CD package for your Office knockoff as long as you put some other name on the disk inside.