This is not a good trend [LWN.net]

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 1, 2025 9:37 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: This is not a good trend by cjwatson
Parent article: Fedora discusses Flatpak priorities

> This is completely unrealistic though. The most salient trademark is likely to be the project name, and most projects refer to themselves all over the place, often in ways that aren't amenable to automatic substitution - translations, screenshots, and so on.

So if I realise a bastardised version of "Watson's Medicinal Compound" that doesn't work, and moreover is harmful to users' computers, you'd be happy to get the blame for it?

A trademark is the user's way of knowing that they are getting the *genuine* *article*. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether you think your version is better or not. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether your version *really* *is* better or not (and that's down to the user, anyway, not you).

The fact is, your version is not the genuine original, and for you to mislead people into thinking it is is called fraud. You HAVE to strip trademarks - that's all there is to it.

(with apologies to Lily :-)

Cheers,
Wol

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This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 1, 2025 22:12 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link] (18 responses)

Which doesn't really respond to cjwatson. If you want people to strip the trademarks, make them easily removable.

> You HAVE to strip trademarks - that's all there is to it.

"Reverse passing off"--the act of stripping the trademarks off and releasing it under your trademarks--can get you sued just like trademark infringement. It's illegal at least in the US and India.

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 2, 2025 0:23 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (14 responses)

>Which doesn't really respond to cjwatson. If you want people to strip the trademarks, make them easily removable.

That would be nice, yes, but it's not a requirement. It IS a legal requirement not to mis-use other peoples' trademarks. I understand Red Hat do that, but it's a lot of work - YOU are expecting volunteers to do loads of work for your benefit, not theirs? If you want - or need - it, you have to do it. You can't expect others to do unpaid work for your benefit.

> "Reverse passing off"--the act of stripping the trademarks off and releasing it under your trademarks--can get you sued just like trademark infringement. It's illegal at least in the US and India.

Even if the licence explicitly permits it?

At the end of the day, as I see it, FLOSS people should be respectful of other people. That includes their reputation and livelihood, and as such Intellectual Property extremism, whether maximalist or minimalist, tends to be driven by people standing on their rights to be jerks :-(

We object to Big Business trying to lock everything up behind "intellectual property" so they can rip everybody else off. Why do we have so many people in our own camp who want to abolish intellectual property so that they can rip other people off and destroy their livelihood and reputation?

Because this particular incident is a perfect example of the latter - the project's reputation is being damaged by people who don't appear to care that their actions are benefiting themselves at the expense of the people actually doing the work. That shouldn't be acceptable behaviour in our community.

Cheers,
Wol

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 2, 2025 2:15 UTC (Sun) by bgilbert (subscriber, #4738) [Link] (1 responses)

> Why do we have so many people in our own camp who want to abolish intellectual property so that they can rip other people off and destroy their livelihood and reputation?

This is free software. No one is being ripped off if someone ships a modified version; it's the whole point of the exercise.

It's good when people can make a livelihood from their work, but sometimes they come to think they're owed one, and that's where the bad behavior often starts. FOSS upstreams are stewards of their projects, not owners, and should not expect to have ultimate say over how the code is deployed or used.

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 2, 2025 9:08 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

In todays world there is more at stake than code. In a world of upstream FOSS developers supported by (or solely funded by) donations, stripping the trademarks and redistributing can reduce upstream's income, potentially to the point that they can no longer fund development. They understandably might not like redistributors of any kind as a result.

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 2, 2025 7:04 UTC (Sun) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link] (11 responses)

> YOU are expecting volunteers to do loads of work for your benefit, not theirs?

You want people to not use your trademarks on Free software, make it easy to not use your trademarks.

> It IS a legal requirement not to mis-use other peoples' trademarks. / Even if the licence explicitly permits it?

What does the license and the law actually say? I'm not aware that either statement is clearly true. Do you have a right to distribute Mozilla Firefox under the Mozilla Firefox name? What if you've had to add a minor patch? What if your only changes are around the code? You're still distributing the item that trademark describes.

On the flip side, what license explicitly permits replacing trademarks? The GPL 3 gives options:

Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you
add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of
that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms:

a) Disclaiming warranty or limiting liability differently from the
terms of sections 15 and 16 of this License; or

b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or
author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal
Notices displayed by works containing it; or

c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or
requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in
reasonable ways as different from the original version; or

d) Limiting the use for publicity purposes of names of licensors or
authors of the material; or

e) Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some
trade names, trademarks, or service marks; or

f) Requiring indemnification of licensors and authors of that
material by anyone who conveys the material (or modified versions of
it) with contractual assumptions of liability to the recipient, for
any liability that these contractual assumptions directly impose on
those licensors and authors.

Those are options, and b) and c) edge towards demanding people do preserve trademarks.

> Because this particular incident is a perfect example of the latter - the project's reputation is being damaged by people who don't appear to care that their actions are benefiting themselves at the expense of the people actually doing the work.

Or Fedora's packagers are the standard overloaded people trying to handle way too much.

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 2, 2025 10:20 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (10 responses)

> > YOU are expecting volunteers to do loads of work for your benefit, not theirs?

> You want people to not use your trademarks on Free software, make it easy to not use your trademarks.

On the flip side, don't abuse other peoples' property, DON'T ABUSE YOUR OWN DOWNSTREAM, don't be a jerk!

> > It IS a legal requirement not to mis-use other peoples' trademarks. / Even if the licence explicitly permits it?

> What does the license and the law actually say? I'm not aware that either statement is clearly true. Do you have a right to distribute Mozilla Firefox under the Mozilla Firefox name? What if you've had to add a minor patch? What if your only changes are around the code? You're still distributing the item that trademark describes.

As I see it, if the licence permits it, then it can't be mis-use, so reverse passing off as you called it can't be mis-use if the licence says that's okay. I've got a WebOS TV which I believe is linux under the hood. So I guess that makes it reverse passing off. And the GPL is PERFECTLY HAPPY with that.

As PJ had a habit of saying, the law is "squishy".

On the strict side, if Firefox is a trademark, then the law is extremely clear - if you get your copy of Firefox from Mozilla, then there is no trademark abuse whatsoever. And yes, people have tried to abuse that and complain that 3rd parties distributing the genuine article are in breach of trademark.

On the flip side of that, how would you like to go to a main dealer, get your brake pads replaced with "Genuine Ford Parts", and then get involved in a possibly fatal crash after maybe only 200 miles because somebody had tricked the supply chain into accepting cheap rip-offs and your brakes failed. It's happened! Which is why trademark abuse is taken very seriously.

It basically boils down to whatever the trademark holder is happy with. Take Linux for example, so long as (a) it's clearly based on an original version of Linux curated by Linus, and so long as it's made clear that an altered version is an altered version (eg I expect my gentoo kernel to have modifications made by the gentoo team), then they're fine with it.

Put differently - don't be a jerk! The trademark is meant to protect the time, effort and money the trademark holder has put into building up a brand. For you to mark your version - and dupe your downstream - into believing what they have is the original, is basically abusing upstream's property. And that's what's happened here.

Fedora received a notice "You are shipping a broken product as if it were the genuine original. Please desist", and they acted like complete jerks. This is very clearly the "Ford Brakes" end of the spectrum. And it could easily end up with upstream shutting down. THAT is why this is serious from the FLOSS point of view. This is quite capable of destroying a project, and all because downstream couldn't care what damage they are causing.

> c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or
> requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in
> reasonable ways as different from the original version; or

That clause pretty much describes what a trademark is - a mark that represents the origin of the material. So to leave those marks in your modified version AND NOT ADD YOUR OWN CLEARLY DISTINGUISHING MARKS is clearly, AND EXPLICITLY, a possible licence breach. And the existence of trademarks is clearly invoking that clause and saying it IS a licence breach.

Cheers,
Wol

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 2, 2025 14:36 UTC (Sun) by PastyAndroid (guest, #168019) [Link] (9 responses)

Perhaps these issues could be solved more easily by distributions taking all bug reports first. E.g, users are always directed to the distributions bug tracker for any software running on the distribution - flatpak or not. Though I thought fedora had this with their crash reporter?

It could be made very clear that they need to do this and the software may have modifications[1]. This would solve the issue of upstream dealing with reports that may not necessarily apply. Thus, not wasting their time/effort.

Perhaps even the software developers themselves could do this, force all distribution users to report to the distribution first while automatically closing new reports that have not done this.

Finally, FOSS applications which have trademark issues (legal threats) can be dropped from distributions to avoid legal issues, ensuring that users only obtain the software from official and authorized sources.

[1] Though, I figured this was common knowledge, a good chunk of software across all distributions has always been modified in some way to make it blend in with the distributions other software, this is standard practice. For example, regardless of distribution you'll rarely get a vanilla kernel (no modifications) or vanilla glibc, vanilla plasma, etc.

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 2, 2025 19:57 UTC (Sun) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (5 responses)

E.g, users are always directed to the distributions bug tracker for any software running on the distribution ... Perhaps even the software developers themselves could do this

Exactly how? And should the software developer really care about the dozen(!) major Linux distributions out there, especially if most if its users are on Mac OS or Windows?

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 2, 2025 20:30 UTC (Sun) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (4 responses)

Yes! Upstream working with downstream distros sounds good on paper until you realize how fragmented the distros are, all with different people, processes and tools. It's untenable.

"Just focus on the important distros" people say, but of course no-one agrees on what are the important ones, and of course every distro that one of your users uses is important to them.

For a lot of apps an upstream-provided Flatpak seems like a pretty good solution. Upstreams like OBS should be able to declare that they don't want distro-packaged distribution. Friendly people should honor the requests of people whose work they're benefiting from, even when they don't legally have to. Therefore distros that don't respect such a request should be shamed and required to do the hard work of ripping out the trademarks.

"Upstreams benefit from downstream packager work too" people say, but it's incredibly asymmetric in general.

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 3, 2025 13:35 UTC (Mon) by PastyAndroid (guest, #168019) [Link] (3 responses)

Again, no.

I said that bug reports could be handled by the distribution first, the user knows which distribution they are using and it is their responsibility to report bugs to the correct place.

Distributions could make this clearer before downloading. E.g, something like "Software included in this distribution is packaged and redistributed by distribution X and may be modified, sometimes this may cause unforeseen issues with the software operation as such if you experience issues we recommend reporting it to our bug tracker <link> first or seeking support from our community at <locations>."[1]

Perhaps even a dialog on first boot could do similar. Thus, the developers in most instances will not have to do anything since the user has already been directed.

As for dealing with it themselves, I did say automated. Perhaps requiring a link to the distributions bug report before accepting a report, for example.

Do note, this mostly only applies to developers who are worried about this kind of thing and how their software is used/distributed.

[1] I'm not a writer or people person, I'm a coder. This will have to be re-written entirely, but you get the point. :-P

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 3, 2025 13:45 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Distributions could make this clearer before downloading. E.g, something like "Software included in this distribution is packaged and redistributed by distribution X and may be modified, sometimes this may cause unforeseen issues with the software operation as such if you experience issues we recommend reporting it to our bug tracker <link> first or seeking support from our community at <locations>."[1]

Distributions can (and do!) do this until they are blue in the face, but end-users will routinely ignore any such notificaitons (even if done on *every* program notificaiton) and go straight for the upstream, nearly every single time.

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 3, 2025 14:46 UTC (Mon) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (1 responses)

This is not how users behave. They see an error message or experience an issue, they search it on Google which will find the original author of the software and not the distribution. Especially if that error message or issue was seen in the Windows or Mac OS versions too. Users don't want to use distributions (or even operating systems for that matter), they want to use a specific set of applications (sometimes with specific versions).

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 3, 2025 16:23 UTC (Mon) by PastyAndroid (guest, #168019) [Link]

If the issue persists across multiple operating systems and on any configuration, then it is not the fault of the distribution and the distribution should not be held responsible.

The issue we're discussing here is where Fedora compiled the application with different versions of software than the application author did, this caused issues with the software. That is a distribution specific issue and would apply in this case and thus, this belongs as a report for the distribution and not the original authors. Such issues should always be first reported to the distribution, not the authors.

The line can get a little blurry as to who is responsible from a users perspective and so, I suggested reporting all issues to the distribution first as a matter of course, the distribution can help guide the user as to whether it's a distribution specific issue or an upstream issue - perhaps the package maintainer or someone on behalf of the distribution could open the upstream bug report as they are in a much better position to provide the necessary information (think debugging and otherwise).

In any case, authors who do not wish to deal with such potential issues can use flathub or other official distribution methods and avoid their packages being redistributed in a distribution using their trademark rights to refuse it. Thus, any issues are solely on the original authors as they control the whole chain in that case.

Overall the key would be to ensure users are properly guided in how to report their problems, removing any ambiguity or need to question it. The easier you make this for users, the better.

We really do not want to be an 'open community' that sues each other using trademark rights when we are unhappy with something. That doesn't sound very open at all. Instead we should aim to solve the underlying issues as opposed to putting a band-aid on issues or ignoring them.

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 2, 2025 21:51 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> Finally, FOSS applications which have trademark issues (legal threats) can be dropped from distributions to avoid legal issues, ensuring that users only obtain the software from official and authorized sources.

Why? Are you advocating punishing upstream, because downstream is being a jerk? All you need to do is abide by the GPL, take responsbility for your own actions, and then there won't be a problem.

This all boils down to the fact that much of Fedora's downstream doesn't realise that this is a Fedora-modified project, and hence upstream gets blamed for Fedora's blunders. To punish upstream, because Fedora screwed up, is completely unacceptable.

At the end of the day, if YOU screw up, OWN IT. Just try it - you'll be amazed. It'll do your reputation (amongst decent people) no harm whatsoever. And if it WILL harm you, to be blunt, that's society I'd rather avoid, thank you very much ... (and if it's work, I'd be looking to jump ship!).

Cheers,
Wol

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 3, 2025 13:26 UTC (Mon) by PastyAndroid (guest, #168019) [Link] (1 responses)

Not at all. Ultimately, if you risk being sued for redistributing a piece of software (modified or not), it is unwise to redistribute it - why take the legal risk?

Also, this does not 'punish' upstream in the slightest. It simply gives them control over their project, if they wish to be the sole distributor then they can be by eliminating the middle man and thus protecting their reputation and project, in this way people are not redistributing it in a form they are unhappy with.

Personally, I'm against the concept of FOSS being treated this way, but I can see it is something some FOSS devs need.

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 3, 2025 17:43 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> if they wish to be the sole distributor then

But they don't.

People keep on attributing other things to upstream, but all upstream wants is *not* to be blamed for downstream's mistake!

That is it!

Cheers,
Wol

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 2, 2025 20:55 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (2 responses)

> "Reverse passing off"--the act of stripping the trademarks off and releasing it under your trademarks--can get you sued just like trademark infringement. It's illegal at least in the US and India.

No, it is not illegal in the US. Fox tried to litigate this exact issue many decades ago, and SCOTUS slapped them down. See https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/02-428

(In that case, the original was in the public domain - but SCOTUS did not stop there, and instead made a blanket ruling that "reverse passing off" is only a thing for physical goods, so you certainly can't apply it to intangible software.)

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 2, 2025 23:37 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

Before anyone misinterprets my comment and insists that I must be wrong, I will clarify: I am talking about trademark law. You still have independent obligations under copyright law.

In the case of the GPL (and most FOSS licenses), there is indeed a requirement to preserve the copyright notice. But a copyright notice is a single line, usually at the top of LICENSE.txt (or COPYING.txt, or whatever your FOSS project decided to call it), that names the author(s) of the software. Hardly anyone ever looks at it, except incidentally when they're trying to check what license is applicable. The name and branding of the product is an entirely different thing altogether, and no FOSS license (that I have ever heard of) explicitly requires you to preserve such branding.

This is not a good trend

Posted Mar 3, 2025 9:44 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

That GPL clause that was pointed out to me elsewhere in this article basically described trademarks and it seems pretty clear to me - whether you are allowed or required to remove distinguishing marks is at the mark-owner's discretion. As explicitly stated in the GPL itself.

Cheers,
Wol