Re: Ongoing Firefox (and Thunderbird) Trademark problems
Gervase Markham wrote:
> The issue is that it has to be X-specific, where X is people we trust to
> make competent releases of software. And we have to judge X on who comes
> to us and says "we claim to be competent".
I think, what some (or a certain amount of) project members complain about, is
the absense of objective, written criteria. Those criteria should somehow define
which criteria X has to satisfy in order to get judged competent.
Publishing a clear policy would be the single best chance to convince a good
amount of them - my guess of course, nothing more. Nevertheless, maybe trying to
work out a guideline might be sufficient too. I understand that this is no easy
job, but maybe it helps.
Nevertheless, I think that we (debian) need to find a way to deal with
trademarks. Even if we decide to use different names, as soon as they get some
recognition, we either need to enforce them activly or some Mr. CleverX, looking
for fun, ;) can come along and claim them - AFAIK & IANAL.
Judging from this, and from the assumption that we do not want to maintain and
enforce a pool of trademarks on our own, I would say that it is our job to work
out some criteria that a *good* free-software distributor should/can fulfill in
order to do good to upstream (in terms that those distributors will honor and
try their best not to harm upstreams trademark). Other projects could adapt
those criteria as well and upstreams - like Mozilla - could publish those
criteria as being suitable for determining the distributors competence ... what
a perfect world ;).
Anyway, I don't expect this to happen (in a timeframe suitable for this Mozilla
story). On the other hand, maybe this is the only chance to find a long term
solution for similar issues in the future...
Cheers,
--
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