I'm going to reply, in some sense, to Gervase Markham's message, but it is in more of a general vein, rather than a point by point discussion. Still my thoughts on the same basic topics, though. While I appreciate Mr. Markham's efforts, and in fact I don't disagree with what I believe are his views overall (that it would be possible, and even a good thing from the Mozilla project's point of view, for Debian to use something along the general lines of the Community Edition standards, possibly with some additional flexibility), and I have no deep and abiding interest in either doing so, or going the iceweasel route, I suspect that the latter may be the only practical answer for a couple of reasons. First, having such a trademark license establishes the Mozilla project as an arbiter of package quality for a Debian package. Any failure to meet these standards, in their sole review, opens the door to allow them to require us to rename the package and strip all trademarks. I am not implying that they would do so lightly, or wouldn't talk to us first to try to resolve it, here; if I thought that was likely, I wouldn't be bothering with all of this, I'd just say iceweasel it. However, the fact that it is even possible is of some concern to me. It leads to some nasty pitfalls, such as "Is it within the trademark license to use the same package name for something that is completely *not* the software, and deliberately attempts to 'trick' users into installing other software when they ask for the Debian Thunderbird Community Edition (DTCE)?" (aka, "a transitional package"). We do have one potential pre-existing case (albeit not a strongly formed one, nor one in active public sight, yet) - the use of the NetBSD trademark under specifically transmittable permissions (IE, to our users), for Debian systems built on top of a kNetBSD kernel. The difference is that the NetBSD folks haven't asked for review powers beyond the right to prevent us from distributing something that would deface their trademark; their only requirement is that it be made clear that we aren't distributing "the NetBSD system", but rather, a Debian system with a NetBSD kernel/core. Even this is rather murky, and got run through SPI's counsel as far as I am aware. Second, with all due respect to the current Mozilla project, even if we trust that they are reasonable enough, today, to not worry about the first point, do we trust that *the holder of the trademark* will be reasonable enough *for as long as we want to distribute the package*? If it somehow got sold, well, the new TM holder could be make life very unpleasant (OK, so this is true for any trademark, but given Mozilla's heritage and the commercial interest in web browsers, I have to consider it more of a risk that this might happen for them, than for JoeBob's AlienKiller game). Even if it remains with the Mozilla project... who would have thought that RMS would have decided documentation doesn't need the same freedoms that software does, putting the FSF and Debian at odds over the question? Or that UWash would have come up with an extremely strange license interpretation years (IIRC) after the initial publication of Pine, in what appears to have been a desire to take the software into a restricted-modification state (oddly similar, in some ways, to what the Mozilla project wants to do, today)? Third, to be honest, while I appreciate (and, in fact, am flattered by) the implication that Mr. Markham, and presumably some significant portion of the rest of the Mozilla project, feel that Debian's QA track record is sufficiently good to allow us some amount of extra leeway in the question of quality packages, it smacks of a Debian-specific license, something which is explicitly forbidden by the DFSG. After all, "our users" can and do include people making other distributions (just look at the CDD stuff). If we, as Debian, can do something that our users can't, with the software in our archive, then it can go, at best, into non-free. Now, again, I don't think that this really needs to happen; I think we should either abide by the available licenses (possibly including one not yet written, but publically useable, if that was what Mr. Markham was implying could be done and I misunderstood it), or go the iceweasel route, rather than sticking things into non-free, which would just be silly when there are two free alternatives (even if we end up deciding that one of them doesn't meet our needs). Minor nit that may not even be true: if (and only if) we really can't name plugins, etc, "thunderbird-plugins-alienkiller", then it seems like one more reason to go the iceweasel route. Debian has a variety of naming policies among package suites, and almost all of them include the core package name *somewhere* (often at the front - libperl-*, netsaint-plugins-* a while back, etc). -- Joel Aelwyn <fenton@debian.org> ,''`. : :' : `. `' `-
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