Re: Ongoing Firefox (and Thunderbird) Trademark problems
El Jueves 16 Junio 2005 18:11, Russ Allbery escribió:
[snip]
> That being said, we absolutely should not allow the trademark issue to
> give MoFo any more of a veto on package changes than any other upstream
> would have. If we feel we need to make a change to improve the package
> for our users and MoFo disagrees with that change and says we can't use
> the trademark if we make it, we should make it, rebrand Firefox, and go on
> with our lives. Debian as a project already tries to work with upstream
> whenever possible, and certainly we should continue to do this, but I'm
> *extremely* uncomfortable with the idea of this trademark license being
> used as a stick to prevent Debian from producing the distribution we want
> to produce.
>
> The most disturbing thing I've seen in this entire thread so far (and I'm
> trying not to overreact, since I don't know the whole story) is hearing
> that Mozilla might veto root CA additions using the trademark liense as a
> stick. I think it's a horrible idea to rebrand Firefox out of worries of
> avoiding a Debian-specific deal, but if the branding ends up being used
> for things like supporting the evil Verisign monopoly against more
> reasonable ways of handling TLS certificates, it would be worth rebranding
> to me to avoid having to wait on those sorts of changes. On the other
> hand, if that statement was just a security concern and a request that
> MoFo be given time to vet new CA additions before they're just added
> downstream, that's probably quite reasonable and the invocation of the
> trademark license stick may have just been a poor choice of wording on
> their part.
Hi!
While I've been actively supporting to don't rename Firefox during all the
thread (because of the reason explained there), I definitely DO support to
rename it if keeping the original name means that we loose the ability to
make some kind of changes to the package, and specifically I support to
rename it if Eric Dorland (as maintaner) doesn't feel free enough to modify
the package when appropiate (as in that example of CA additions).
Until the moment, I thought all the time that MoFo was trusting Debian and
therefore we were allowed to make any changes we considered appropiate.
Anyway, I'd like bring again the Debian example that I wrote and nobody
replied. I was not joking. Consider:
"What happens if tomorrow I start redistributing a modifyed Debian version
(only bugfixes; of course, I will decide what bugs are for me...) and I call
it "Debian GNU/Linux Sarge 3.1"?
Will I have a trademark issue with SPI?"
Almost for sure, I'll have a problem with SPI and the Debian trademark.
If the criteria expressed by some in this thread is true, we ** should rename
Debian ** because we are using a right that our users can't use (we can ship
Debian with the name "Debian" because we are Debian, so it it is a special
right that our users can't access). I think this is totally absurd and
illustrates that trademarks have nothing to do with software freedom, and we
should accept this kind of name limitations.
Regards,
César
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