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Case example: AudacityCase example: AudacityPosted Feb 6, 2013 21:53 UTC (Wed) by david.a.wheeler (guest, #72896)Parent article: Trademarks and their limits
I just finished a long process of rebuilding a Windows system "from scratch" because a user installed a version of Audacity that had been corrupted with all sorts of virii, malware, adware, browser redirects, and I'm pretty certain a keylogger too.
The problem isn't the Audacity project itself. The problem is that it's becoming easy for shady organizations to fool users into installing their subverted version.
Trademarks do present some minor risks to software freedoms (making it harder to use freedoms), but they also provide real benefits without actually preventing users and developers from using their freedoms. So while I understand Debian's stance, I think there are some very good reasons to have and use trademarks for FLOSS projects.
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Case example: Audacity Posted Feb 8, 2013 16:54 UTC (Fri) by viiru (subscriber, #53129) [Link]
> So while I understand Debian's stance, I think there are some very good
> reasons to have and use trademarks for FLOSS projects.
I can't tell if the original commenter knows this or not, but from the comment it's easy to misunderstand so I'll mention that Debian as an organization is not anti-trademark, as can be seen from the fact that Debian also owns trademarks and has a policy for them (which isn't "do anything you want"): http://www.debian.org/trademark.en.html
Debian is also currently working on a policy for incoming trademarks to make it easier to decide what is acceptable (this is a fairly practical consideration, like "can we patch this to provide security support for the duration of a stable release" and such) and what should trigger a rename to remove the trademark.
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