Re: Ongoing Firefox (and Thunderbird) Trademark problems
On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 01:01:05AM -0400, Eric Dorland wrote:
>
> My problem with it is DFSG 8. If we accept a trademark license, we're
> attaching additional rights to the program that are Debian-specific. I
> understand that the DFSG were framed in the context of copyright
> licenses, but I think it makes sense in a broader context.
>
It's not _Debian_ specific per se. Think of it as a Macdonalds franchise
:) Everyone who wants to buy a Macdonalds restaurant has to commit to
meeting standards, training staff the Macdonalds way and so on. A Thai
Macdonalds in Bangkok might, for example, want to package fish
sauce/green chilli sauce for dipping your McNuggets into - for local taste.
They'd need to seek a licence for the packaging and an OK that their
modifications don't take them outside the Macdonalds franchise. A Macdonalds
in Hong Kong might want hoi sin sauce - or whatever. Basic burgers and so on
remain the same, worldwide, and the trademark is very aggressively enforced.
Reading the posts from Gerv and grokking context:
This is not quite the same: the Mozilla Foundation are approving our
coding quality and stating that modifications we make are not diluting
the quality behind their trademark BUT they are not saying that we are
the only people who can do this and granting an exclusive licence.
Any coders who meet their standards and don't weaken their quality can
use their trademark if they ask first.
The trademark is enforced, but they're not hostile about it and willing
to work with us to reach an acceptable situation. Win-win: they get
Mozilla products packaged to work well as .debs (and an organisation to
talk to if there are problems) and continued distribution: we have our
packaging changes endorsed, don't have to rename packages and have a
productive relationship with what is now one of the best known names
after Linux. [Lots of people are being persuaded to try free and open
source software purely by having used Firefox on Windows].
[All trademarks explicitly acknowledged as the property of their
respective owners and used here for purely illustrative purposes in a
statement of opinion. No legal liability is to be inferred :) ]
Just my 0.02 whatever
> --
> Eric Dorland <eric.dorland@mail.mcgill.ca>
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