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 20:40 UTC (Tue) by kimoto (subscriber, #5244)
In reply to: Interesting conversation, but I think it will work out OK by madscientist
Parent article: Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

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.

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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.