On Sunday 29 February 2004 04.19, Eric Dorland wrote: [me: drop mozilla?] > Ok, you're being silly here. The code is free. The name, however, is a > trademark so we might not be able to use it. Yes, partly, I'm just being silly. The other part of me feels: first, some people run an open source project (or call it free software, or Zenaan will explode again), but then they make it difficult for other projects (such as the volounteer driven Debian project) to take the advantage that FOSS provides (namely, to change the source code) by using a trademark law kludge. Now *this* is, imho, just not honest. If you're publishing a project under an open license, you got to expect that people take your software and change it. If you don't want that, go proprietary and sell it for what it is. Yes, you can still take the Firefox source code and use it to make a browser that is almost like Firefox - but (this is especially true for a web browser) the non-educated user will want an button labeled 'Firefox' with the icon he knows. So changing the icon and the name will lessen the usability of Debian significatntly, imho. cheers -- vbi -- Owners of digital watches: Your day's are numbered!
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