Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

Posted Jan 10, 2005 23:50 UTC (Mon) by josh_stern (guest, #4868)
In reply to: Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks by piman
Parent article: Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

> The word "Debian" did not appear in the post you replied to.

Debian was a central topic in the post where you originally called the Mozilla policy "stupid". More importantly, I'm a Debian user and I appreciate the quality of their improvements to many packages, and the way that many of them are customized to Debian. But I also recognize a substantial difference between the development process of Mozilla and that of many typical upsource software projects included in Debian. Debian is one example of somebody who wants to make changes and its apparently an example where Mozilla will allow them to call the changed version Mozilla, Thunderbird, etc. So Debian is not an example of Mozilla's policy causing them problems.

Mozilla is worried about protecting themselves from inappropriate use and Debian is worried that at some point in the future, Mozilla might, at least theoretically, ask Debian to (gasp!) call the package by a different name if they don't see eye to eye with the changes. Mozilla's worry seems more serious.