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Re: Bug#212895: Official Logo is not DFSG Free (with patch)



On Sat, Oct 04, 2003 at 01:46:15PM -0400, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> Hmm.  Your mailer is honoring MFT, but not sending it: you CC'd
> Jaldhar, but didn't maintain him in the MFT.  Might be a good thing to
> fix, so other people don't get blamed for CCing someone due to a third
> party dropping the header.  :)
> 
> On Sat, Oct 04, 2003 at 05:16:54PM +0300, Richard Braakman wrote:
> > > People have asked "why isn't the official use logo DFSG-free?" on
> > 
> > As far as I remember, the conclusion has always been "It should be;
> > we're inappropriately using copyrights to enforce a trademark restriction".
> > 
> > We could instead leave the logo unencumbered by copyright, so that
> > people can derive their own logos from it, while enforcing our trademark,
> > so that people aren't allowed to use it to create confusion between
> > their work and ours.
> 
> Thanks for the clarification.
> 
> However, I'd wonder how a logo with a trademark-enforced restriction of
> "unauthorized projects only" or similar would be DFSG-free?  I'd suppose
> it would fall under the "if you change this, change the name" allowances;
> "if you change this product, change the logo".  I'm not sure if that's
> free, though.

I agree with Richard; I think we should leave the Open Use logo
basically unencumbered by copyright (or bust it down to a MIT/X11-ish
copyright so that the person who designed the logo remains credited),
and maybe by trademark as well.  We probably don't want to do either
with the Official Logo.

The important point to me is that *we simply don't know the Debian OS is
going to be used, modified, or redistributed*.  It is therefore *not
appropriate* for us to distribute the Official Logo in the Debian OS
itself.

If we do care how people are going use, modify or redistribute the
Debian OS, then we need to scrap the Social Contract entirely.

But I thought that we're supposed to be about freedom.

[ I will also note that the Open Use Debian logo was used for a while to
symbolize "Chechnya Updates" at www.mujahedeen-news.com.  (I think the
site has been defunct for a long time -- but it wasn certainly our logo
as the image filename retained the string "debian"!) ]

-- 
G. Branden Robinson                |     I am only good at complaining.
Debian GNU/Linux                   |     You don't want me near your code.
branden@debian.org                 |     -- Dan Jacobson
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |

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