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Re: trademark licenses and DFSG: a summary



On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 03:26:59PM +0000, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> You can't trust entities like Debian to stay "good" forever. The only
> practical way to maintain trust is to maintain some degree of control.
> You can't enumerate all the possible kinds of badness you'd want to
> forbid, and then grant a blanket trademark license to everyone
> allowing everything else.
You speaking from the rights of trademark holders. They're well within
their rights to make their trademark license whatever they want it to
be. Just like they are well within their rights to license their
programs however they want.

What I'm talking about is what Debian should accept and everything you
are saying about retrospective control of a program is everything that
is bad about this situation for Debian.

> requirements. That say Firefox is distributed under a DFSG-free
> license means that any idiot who thinks it's a great idea to create a
> browser that replaces all web page pictures with Goatse images is free
> to use Firefox code to achieve his goal. However, trademarks are meant
So what? With no trademark they could do this now. With trademarks you
are saying they cannot. The user has lost some freedom here.  There are
plenty of times when we have done something to a program that upstream 
might not like; with your scenario they can revoke the trademark and
therefore our way of being able to distribute the package.

> If you want to allow doing all modifications permitted by the DFSG
> (which includes obnoxious ones) without the effort of rebranding, then
> you must remove all use of trademarks from Debian, including the
This I don't understand. To me there are two scenarios:
  1) The trademark license permits us to do everything that a DFSG
  license would permit
  2) It doesn't

We accept 1 and not 2.  A Debian-specific trademark fits in #2 so
we cannot accept it and either don't package it or rename it.

 - Craig

-- 
Craig Small VK2XLZ   http://enc.com.au/          csmall at : enc.com.au
Debian GNU/Linux     http://www.debian.org/      csmall at : debian.org
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