Re: Ongoing Firefox (and Thunderbird) Trademark problems
On Tue, June 14, 2005 08:00, Eric Dorland wrote:
> Now, the Mozilla Foundation is willing to give us permission to use
> the marks, but only to Debian specifically. To me, this feels like a
> violation (at least in spirit) of DFSG #8.
However, in #4, an explicit exception is made for program names and
version numbers. They are not considered fundamental enough to software to
require them to be as absolutely free as source code. So if we accept this
exception for software coming in, why can't we accept this same exception
for software derived from our distribution?
We don't want to limit the freedoms of those deriving from our
distribution, but we accept that limiting the freedom of some trademarks
is acceptable. We accept that we can use the Mozilla trademarks, but we
also accept that this might not be applicable to downstreams that make
huge modifications.
It might be beneficial though to have an agreement with MoFo that allows
for downstreams of Debian to also use the name, as long as they only
modify the package in ways similar to Debian. If you have a downstream
that just copies, or copies-and-fixes-bugs, this would surely be just as
acceptable to MoFo, right?
Thijs
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