No trademarks in upstream source

Trademarks are inherently proprietary, so being present in the source repository means that the source is no longer entirely FOSS.

As a monopoly power, trademarks exist to control what other people do with your software. Force them to stick to your rules about what are acceptable changes, or put in a lot of effort to manually strip out every instance of the trademark. Think about the Firefox/Iceweasel situation (which we may have to go back to given Mozilla's recent changes), or Chef or Docker or many other trademark related situations. Adding trademarks littered throughout your source code is simply a demonstration of your intent to control or penalise downstream redistributors. Not adding trademarks to your source code demonstrates that you understand that FOSS means surrendering your monopoly over your own work. It also makes FOSS feel more like a *community* and less like a jungle

https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-y...

People who are working for free on FOSS projects, do not register trademarks at all. It is mainly commercial vendors like RedHat, or large projects with large donation streams. Such projects could definitely afford the time to make the trademark a runtime or build-time parameter. As an example; in recent years RedHat finally released the source code for their non-upstreamed enterprise documentation. With the switch to systemd, most of it probably applies on Debian too, so I would like to package it for Debian, but their trademarks are everywhere so removing them is going to be months of work to do in my non-paid spare time, so it will probably never happen.

https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/docs/enterprise-d...

Removing trademarks from source also makes your work as upstream simpler, since making the trademarks a runtime or build-time parameter means that when you get a branding refresh, a new logo, or even a name change, then it is one change in one place, not everywhere you ended up copying it. Imagine if every Debian desktop and window manager package had a copy of the Debian logo and the Debian wallpaper, it would be a nightmare to update the wallpaper once per release, or to go from the chicken logo to the swirl logo. We sensibly separate that out into the desktop-base package.