Re: The Spirit of Free Software, or The Reality

[Philipp Kern <pkern@debian.org>]

On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 02:59:15PM +0200, Ole Streicher wrote:
> If someone wants to have a DFSG compatible system, then he should be
> able to get it -- which means that he should be allowed to change
> whatever he wants (and to publish it). Then he does not get the original
> icons.
> 
> This who can live with icons that are not legally editable can just
> enable non-free and use the icons. I don't see any complication here.

But the copyright license doesn't matter much for this, unless it
contains a trademark grant. Which isn't what we historically required.
The reason we avoid the Firefox image for Mozilla's Firefox is their
trademark policy, not its copyright license.

So I'm hard pressed to see a case where you'd be able to freely create
derived works of trademarked icons even if the copyright license were
to be fixed.

And there are a lot more trademarks in Debian. Similarly you are not
allowed to modify Debian and distribute it as Debian. Hence the case
of trademarked icons seems to be fairly distinct from the usual
modification clauses we want. Required icon changes and renames are
similar.

Kind regards
Philipp Kern