Re: Ongoing Firefox (and Thunderbird) Trademark problems
On Fri, 17 Jun 2005, Eric Dorland wrote:
> * Don Armstrong (don@debian.org) wrote:
> > the last sentence in DFSG #4 only talks about renaming, not being
> > forced to change content.
>
> If I change the name of my program, I also change all references to
> that name in program (if for no other reason, consistency).
You should change them when it makes sense to you. However, being
forced to do so by the trademark license when it doesn't make sense to
you is another thing entirely.[1]
Imagine suddenly having to go and rip out every single reference to
the name of a program, some of which could be intricately tied into
the codebase; or a library that required you to rename all symbols
bearing the name of the library, and thus change any symbols that the
library exported.
Don Armstrong
1: Many things that the DFSG allows are relatively insane; I'm sure we
all have examples of code that should be outlawed (some of the code
I've written definetly qualifies.) However, when the license restricts
these types of modifications, the freedom of the license begins to
come into question.
--
This space for rent
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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