Re: The Spirit of Free Software, or The Reality
On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 01:07:00PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > BTW, that's something that would need to be resolved once and for all by
> > an SPI lawyer, because a) Mozilla's lawyers consider those icons kocher
> > as MPL-licensed icons and b) that's a problem broader than just
> > iceweasel, as it concerns any package with references to external
> > services (and a recurring question on debian-legal).
>
> There isn't a legal problem, surely. I can't imagine that ebay or
> whoever mind us copying their icon in this way. There is surely a
> formal legal copyright licence from ebay which makes the icon
> redistributable for this kind of purpose. As for trademarks, we are
> using the icon to refer to the organisation in question, so we do not
> even need permission (although there is almost certainly a formal
> permission document).
>
> AFAICT no-one has suggested that redistributing unmodified copies of
> these icons along with the corresponding search engine thingies in
> Iceweasl is contrary to any laws, or contrary to the wishes of the
> copyright or trademark owners.
>
> The problem is simply that the icons are non-DFSG-free.
I'm not even convinced it's a non-DFSG-freeness problem. You know what?
(IANAL opinion here) If upstream is telling me these files are MPL-kocher,
I have no reason not to believe them. MPL is DFSG-free, right? Now,
surely, you can't modify company logos without some legal boundaries,
but those come from trademark laws. Guess what, the same freaking
problem exists with the Debian DFSG-free logo!
I, myself, find our DFSG-freeness pickiness going too far, and I'm sick
of this icon thing. So, here's what I'm going to do: unless I hear
non-IANAL objection until the next upstream release due on august 11
(and I'm BCCing the DPL in case he wants to have the SPI lawyer(s) look
into this), I will remove the replacement of the bundled icons with
urls.
Mike
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