Re: Ongoing Firefox (and Thunderbird) Trademark problems

[Lionel Elie Mamane <lionel@mamane.lu>]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 09:43:04PM +0100, Gervase Markham wrote:
> Simon Huggins wrote:

>> Why does the Mozilla Foundation feel the need to enforce quality
>> through this blunt tool of stopping us using the trademark?

> Because we can't do it using a copyright licence? ;-P

What do you mean you can't? You most certainly can, "just" rewrite the
license to say that redistribution of modified versions is permitted
only it passes QA. Or if it passes QA _or_ the name is changed. Or if
it passes QA _or_ the name is changed _or_ the program says
"Unofficial Version" everywhere. Yes, it would make you
GPL-incompatible, possibly even non-free software (depending on which
of the above you choose and the difficulty of rebranding).

The impression you are making here is "Hey, we want to enforce some
limitation, but if we do it through copyright license, we will put
ourselves out of the free software community. So we backdoor the very
same limitation through trademark law in the hope that the free
software community will be confused enough to still count us as a
member, and accept our trojan horse."

(I'm not saying this is the case, I haven't read enough of the MoFo
 trademark threads to make such a judgement. But this reaction of
 yours certainly makes it seem so.)

-- 
Lionel