Fedora, Mozilla, and trademarks [LWN.net]

Fedora, Mozilla, and trademarks

Posted Apr 28, 2010 17:23 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
Parent article: Fedora, Mozilla, and trademarks

It seems to me that the trademark policy is not all that different from section 2a of the GPL; if you do make changes, you have to take responsibility for those changes, and it's a logical extension to the case where some of the recipients don't read all of the source files.

Regardless of the legal mechanism, it makes sense to ask who is supposed to be responsible for the pre-installed web browser executables on Linux systems. If Fedora is accepting bug reports and fixing them, they're taking the direct responsibility, and so these executables should be branded in such a way as to let users know this. If the user has downloaded the browser directly from Mozilla, or the distro is just redistributing Mozilla's download, it should be Mozilla-branded.

Of course, most packages don't need a distro branding, but that's because most packages don't have a big user-facing project. Kernel.org, for example, doesn't distribute and maintain built Linux kernel executables that end users are expected to download and start using because they saw a Linux ad in the newspaper.

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Fedora, Mozilla, and trademarks

Posted Apr 28, 2010 18:09 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

This GPLv2 requirement is frequently ignored: You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it ... and copy and distribute such modifications ... provided that ... You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.

I've seen claims that without such a clause, the GPL wouldn't be valid in countries with a concept of the moral rights of a creator (like France): this kind of thing is to protect the reputation of the original authors, so that if someone comes along and makes a botch of the program, it doesn't reflect on the original creator. However, IANAL so I don't know if this claim is correct.

Fedora, Mozilla, and trademarks

Posted Apr 28, 2010 21:57 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Conveniently just using a DVCS like git (and allowing public access to the git repository from which you build any binaries) seems to meet your obligation here unless you imagine a legal opponent will convince a court that the resulting metadata doesn't constitute a "prominent notice" carried by the file. All bets are off on language like that where lay people (in this case people who don't read source code for a living) have no intuition about what's intended.

Fedora, Mozilla, and trademarks

Posted Apr 29, 2010 0:57 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Git certainly has the information about what changed and when, as does any other revision control system, distributed or not. But as soon as you do a release from it, and make a tarball, if that tarball doesn't have changelogs and updated version numbers, you've broken the rules (besides, it's just bad manners and confusing).