* Sven Luther (sven.luther@wanadoo.fr) wrote: > It seems to me they are selling t-shirts and whatever and the result of that > money serves to buy more t-shirts and stuff, is donated to debian as UK-based > money when asked by the DPL/SPI/whoever, and occasionally serves to pay beer > for the anual barbeque or whatever. > > This doesn't strike me as much different than loads of other inon-profit associations > (maybe thisis a frenchisism though ?) do in all legallity, and i see nothing > there which really involves trademark or our attitude with regard commercial > distributions. I do believe there are non-profits out there which do exactly this. This issue is about doing it using Debian's name (the trademark issue) and attempting to appear as part of Debian (the non-commercial issue). If DUS/Debian-UK is really the UK branch of Debian then it needs to act as Debian does and be non-commercial. If it's not the UK branch of Debian then it shouldn't be calling itself Debian-UK and shouldn't be accepting donations and holding money on behalf of Debian. What makes it even worse is that on debian.org websites we claim to not sell products yet at the *Debian* booth at whichever UK expos DUS goes to we *are* selling products. It seems pretty likely that the sponsored booth is in Debian's name, either explicitly or as Debian-UK with the assumption that Debian-UK is the UK branch of Debian. > .From my overview of this discussion, it is just a petty person dispute > between the "in" people and the "out" ones, and some critiziscm at the fact > that debian-uk was setup slopily and in a way which may make random UK based > DD liable (altough i guess any court would take the reasonable approach over > the opt-out thingy, and not make those co-opted members liable, but IANAL). I believe there is some animosity due to the opt-out issue but that's not what I'm focused on since it's not terribly interesting. There are some important issues here regarding Debian's non-commercial stance and use of its name in other countries. > So, go solv your internal and interpersonal affairs between yourselves, or > bring some more real problems here that warrant this long flamewar :) It might help to point out that I'm not in the UK.. Thanks, Stephen
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