Re: Firefox/Thunderbird trademarks: a proposal
On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 11:53:14PM -0500, Walter Landry wrote:
> Gervase Markham <gerv@mozilla.org> wrote:
> > Here's my attempt at something which hopefully everyone can accept. I've
> > tried to take into account all the excellent feedback over the past few
> > weeks, for which I thank all involved. Comments are in square brackets.
> >
> > This assumes that DFSG #8 means that Debian can be given rights over and
> > above the rights necessary to make a program free, as long as all the
> > rights necessary to make it free are transferable.
>
> This is true, but the package that Debian distributes has to have all
> of the necessary freedoms. With this trademark license, people other
> than Debian still can't apply bug fixes etc. and redistribute the
> result without undo effort.
"undo effort" Did you meant "undue effort" ?
In that case, this can be covered by
2) The Foundation agrees to document the procedure for changing the name
to its satisfaction, for the benefit of Debian and anyone else, and to
work to make that procedure as simple as possible.
[This means that if you or a Debian redistributor ever has to change the
name, it hopefully won't be too onerous. And it means we can't blindside
anyone with 'but you forgot to change *this* instance".]
If the procedure is really as simple as possible, then they will be able
to apply bug fixes _and_ remove the trademarked material without undue
burden. If it happens that the Debian packaging make very hard to rename
that package, we cannot blaim the Mozilla fundation for that and we
should rather try to fix the packaging scripts.
In the extreme case we could ship a firefox package that depend on a
iceweasel package that contains the actual program while firefox is just
a dummy package that cause iceweasel to call itself firefox. Custom
distributions patching iceweasel can just add a Conflicts: firefox or
not shipping the firefox deb at all.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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