Re: Mozilla and Trademarks
Hi Gerv,
I wish you a happy new year. I was just composing a mail that would get you
involved in this discussion, but apparently you came on your own ;). Fine. In
addition I added Eric (the firefox maintainer) to CC since he is not subscribed
to -legal.
Gervase Markham wrote:
I have to say that Alex's original "summary" of our position actually
misrepresented our position in a number of ways. He actually posted the
full mail I sent him[0] after the discussion finished; I would ask
people to please read that to see what I actually said, and whether we
can come to an arrangement which allows Debian to use the name
"Thunderbird" for their version of our software.
Yes, the initial post was not complete and I apologize for it. But hey, the
discussion was far from over at that point.
That's not strictly true - the Community Edition method was one
suggestion of a way Debian could distribute our stuff, and still label
it "Thunderbird". It's not the only way. I have a lot of time for
Debian, and I'm happy to spend time negotiating something that works for
both sides, if such a thing exists, rather than just pointing you at our
standard policy.
I suggest that we make a standard policy that works for all and not for debian
only. Otherwise, I feel that there are problems with dfsg, since we cannot grant
the same rights to our users, that you granted us. But, here I might be wrong
and maybe others want to elaborate on this.
> Another IMHO more important point is, that we need (they want us) to
> add a statement to the thunderbird copyright file like:
This is just not true. I said that Debian _may_ wish to make their users
aware of the need to remove our trademarks if they modified the package,
and suggested some wording. I am well aware of the pitfalls of mandating
text to be placed here, there or everywhere.
No, you said we _may_, but in parenthesis you stated "(and we would
request that they)".
> I think they want us to negotiate all package names individually. In
> addition, they will be god for us (e.g. we add a patch, they have to
> agree). [ Quoted from [3] ]
We would need to come to an arrangement about each package name (which
may revolve around a naming scheme). But there's only three or four of
them. And the statement about us "being a god for you" isn't true. We'd
need to find some way to come to an accommodation - we don't want
software hacked around to an arbitrary degree being labelled
"Thunderbird", but obviously you need to make changes and security
updates without delay or hassle.
It's not only about security updates or minor integration changes. Thunderbird
and Firefox distributed in debian are actually of higher quality than what you
provide ;). For example the extension manager is completely broken for global
install and a patch for this (the patch the debian fox and bird use) is just
hanging around in bugzilla waiting for a comment from ben for ages. Without this
patch a distribution would be nearly impossible for us.
So the question is: is the Mozilla Foundation's wish to have a level of
quality control over things labelled with its trademark fundamentally
incompatible with the Debian project's goals? If so, I'm afraid we're in
Iceweasel land. But I hope that's not the case.
Maybe someone else want to comment on this. From what the current discussion
revealed, we are not able to distribute it, if you have some kind of veto on
what changes are allowed and what not.
P.S. If you do end up deciding to rename the packages, you don't want to
use the -zilla postfix. The reason for this is explained under "Related
Software" in [4].
That's the question I wanted to ask you. We started discussion about names that
would be suitable for the trademark-free versions. Though, I suggested some, I
think that _you_ should come up with _decent names_ (e.g. not lightningcrap,
etc.). I would hope that you come up with names that are as carefully choosen as
your trademarked ones.
My suggestion here would be to give your projects something like a codename
(e.g. thunderbird codename freehawk) and explicitly grant the right to use those
codenames for derived works of thunderbird in your trademark policy. The same
would be true for mozilla, firefox and sunbird.
Cheers,
Alexander
--
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