Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

Posted Jan 20, 2005 10:12 UTC (Thu) by slef (subscriber, #14720)
Parent article: Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

Well, I think there are two aspects to this. The first is the trademark licence (which covers the software in a way, so is a software licence in a way), should follow DFSG - as some have pointed out, that's not usually a problem for trademarks. You have to do something pretty restrictive (like Mozilla's general offer) to cause a problem. The second is that some of the branding artwork is under a copyright licence that makes it not follow DFSG, so even if the trademark permission works, the branding artwork will probably still end up in the non-free section of the archive (and so not on official CDs).

The main conversation has not gone private and I'm not sure why you suggested it had. I mentioned on-list when I've tried a private approach in the past. Then, Mozilla Foundation just walked away. If they drop the ball this time, you'll see it in public.

The other key things to note are: 1) It's the package maintainer's choice whether they want to follow terms offered by MoFo to get access to the name; 2) Today's package maintainer should not commit debian or future maintainers to any contract-like restriction. Those are my main remaining questions with the terms Gerv's posted to debian-legal and the comments here.

Apologies if any of the above is in error - it's not as easy to check in a web browser as a mail/news client.

---

(Log in to post comments)