selfhtml license + trademark violation

[Uwe Hermann <uh1763@hermann-uwe.de>]

Hi everyone.

> Therefore I think selfhtml cannot go into main.

I received two private emails from Debian developers who agreed with me
and suggested to file a bug against selfhtml (which I already did).

As selfhtml was orphaned, I decided to adopt it and fix this bug
(and others) myself. I already renamed the O: bug to ITA:.

When I compared the upstream *.zip file of selfhtml with the Debian
orig.tar.gz I found the following difference:

The file tbcf.htm in the selfhtml Debian package lacks the following 3 lines:

<img src="xeng.gif" width=16 height=10 border=0>&nbsp;<a target="_top" href="http://www.ftpx.com/";>
<b>FTP Explorer</b></a> <br>
Grafische FTP-Oberfl&auml;che f&uuml;r Win95/NT.<br>


This is because there's a lawsuit going on in Germany about a trademark
violation of the name 'Explorer' by a company called Symicron GmbH.

Details: http://www.teamone.de/selfaktuell/talk/rechtundlinks.htm
(German only)

I guess the change was made by Marco Budde, the previous maintainer of
the selfhtml Debian package, in 7.0-2:


selfhtml (7.0-2) unstable stable; urgency=high

  * !!! Important !!! Please remove all old copies of the selfhtml
    package. They violate a trademark.
  * /usr/share/doc

 -- Marco Budde <budde@debian.org>  Fri, 25 Jun 1999 08:52:51 +0200


But this change IMHO violates the selfhtml license, because it does not
allow changes of the optical appearance or the content of the document.
Only changes of the form of the document are allowed for Debian
(See my previous mail).


So:

 * Leaving the three lines out violates the selfhtml license.

 * Re-adding the three lines to not violate the selfhtml license will
   possibly violate a trademark (the law suit is still going on!).


So what can we do?

 * Contact the upstream author of selfhtml and ask if he allows us to
   remove those three lines?

 * As a special permission for Debian, we are allowed to change links.
   Maybe we could re-add the three lines and just change the name of the
   link from 'FTP Explorer' to 'FTP XXXX' or something, so that it doesn't
   violate the trademark?

 * Remove selfhtml from Debian altogether?


Any comments, ideas or suggestions are appreciated...


TIA, Uwe.
-- 
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