Wrong conclusion [LWN.net]

Wrong conclusion

Posted Jan 12, 2005 12:11 UTC (Wed) by filipjoelsson (subscriber, #2622)
In reply to: Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks by piman
Parent article: Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

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.

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