On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 02:34:00AM -0400, Eric Dorland wrote: > "Presumably" isn't good enough IMHO. If they cared about fairness they > would develop a trademark policy that could be applied to everyone, > based on the "quality" criteria that is right now only known to the > MoFo. How do you judge quality? Do you apply some basic filter, read a metric, and say "this program scores 83% on the scale of good code"? Or do you have a look at how people write their code, what the result is, and whether you think that result is a good thing? In other words, do you make a judgement call? I think it's the last one; and I think it's going to be pretty damn impossible to make even one "objective" criterium -- not to mention any plural form. Any judgement of quality involves some subjective judgement call somewhere. Not only because it's impossible to think of all the tricks someone could come up with to sidestep the set of rules you come up with, while still doing stuff you don't want people to associate with your name; also because quality /is/ a very subjective subject matter, after all. > Debian shouldn't be encouraging the use of trademarks that are not > equally accessible to all. True. But what makes you say they're not equally accessible? Do you have proof that the Mozilla Foundation is indeed not interested in treating everyone by the same set of rules, and is treating us other than it is (or will be) treating any of our derivatives? If not, I don't see what the problem is. Cabal fears perhaps? Well, then maybe you could suggest that they publically state something like "We decide on a case-by-case basis whether we think some distributor is holding up to our standards; but if we feel they are not, we will always fully motivate our decision", or "We decide on a case-by-case [...]; but the process is open on $mailinglist for everyone to follow", or something similar to that. Would that satisfy your fears? > And we are definitely getting special treatment already from the MoFo: > would they really even be entertaining this discussion if we were not > such a large distribution? Well, I don't know. If I knew my name was being dragged through the mud, I'd react too. Being called names such as "MoFo"[1], or being accused of not treating everyone the same way without evidence to support that action would trigger some nasty response from my end, for sure. And if that takes a loooong "discussion", so be it. [1] "Mother****er". Yeah, yeah, I know. Bad pun. -- The amount of time between slipping on the peel and landing on the pavement is precisely one bananosecond
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