Dear Debian Legal Gurus:In February 2004, the issue was raised [1] on the debian-devel mailing list regarding the trademark issues surrounding the Mozilla Firefox browser (which, in actual fact, is not limited to just Firefox). A brief flury of messages followed, which didn't seem to actually address the issue that was originally raised.
The Mozilla Organization tightly restricts the use of the Mozilla name and logos. My non-legal interpretation of their licensing page [2] is that it requires written permission to use Mozilla trademarks for any modified versions of their software. I believe all of the Mozilla packages in Debian would fall under this restriction.
I've searched the mailing lists for any other references to this issue, but haven't found any further discussions.
Technically, Debian is probably already using Mozilla trademarks. This is a murky area, in which copyright meets trademark, because most of these usages appear to be included with DFSG-free licensed source code. When Mozilla.org releases source code under open-source licenses, which includes trademarks it purports to restrict the use of, which takes precidence?
Has anyone at Debian sought permission from the Mozilla Organization to use the Mozilla trademarks in its packages? In your legal opinions, would it make a substantive difference?
Even if Debian had permission to use Mozilla trademarks in its packages, I doubt that the original issue of using the Mozilla Firefox icon could be adequately addressed. The icon itself would not be DFSG-free, therefore not suitable for inclusion in the Debian distribution.
Are there any other examples of restrictions placed on open-source licenses that Debian has had to deal with in the past? When a package is resricted by trademark usage, does Debian have a policy to effectively deal with it?
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/02/msg01877.html [2] http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/licensing.html Yours truly, Paul C. Bryan email@pbryan.net
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