Re: Firefox/Thunderbird trademarks: a proposal

[Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>]

Bill Allombert <allomber@math.u-bordeaux.fr> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 11:53:14PM -0500, Walter Landry wrote:
> > Gervase Markham <gerv@mozilla.org> wrote:
> > > Here's my attempt at something which hopefully everyone can accept. I've 
> > > tried to take into account all the excellent feedback over the past few 
> > > weeks, for which I thank all involved. Comments are in square brackets.
> > > 
> > > This assumes that DFSG #8 means that Debian can be given rights over and 
> > > above the rights necessary to make a program free, as long as all the 
> > > rights necessary to make it free are transferable.
> > 
> > This is true, but the package that Debian distributes has to have all
> > of the necessary freedoms.  With this trademark license, people other
> > than Debian still can't apply bug fixes etc. and redistribute the
> > result without undo effort.  
> 
> "undo effort" Did you meant "undue effort" ?

Yep (whoops).

> In that case, this can be covered by 
> 
>     2) The Foundation agrees to document the procedure for changing the name
>     to its satisfaction, for the benefit of Debian and anyone else, and to
>     work to make that procedure as simple as possible.
>     
>     [This means that if you or a Debian redistributor ever has to change the
>     name, it hopefully won't be too onerous. And it means we can't blindside
>     anyone with 'but you forgot to change *this* instance".]
> 
> If the procedure is really as simple as possible, then they will be able
> to apply bug fixes _and_ remove the trademarked material without undue
> burden.

There is a difference between "simple as possible" and "undue burden".
It may turn out that as simple as possible is still hard.  If it were
phrased something like

  To change the name, the Mozilla foundation will find it sufficient
  to change only the single instance of the name in branding.txt.

then I would be happy.  That is, the amount of work has to be
specified and really, really small, or it could still get out of hand
through no one's fault.

> If it happens that the Debian packaging make very hard to rename
> that package, we cannot blaim the Mozilla fundation for that and we
> should rather try to fix the packaging scripts.
> 
> In the extreme case we could ship a firefox package that depend on a
> iceweasel package that contains the actual program while firefox is just
> a dummy package that cause iceweasel to call itself firefox. Custom
> distributions patching iceweasel can just add a Conflicts: firefox or
> not shipping the firefox deb at all.

In that case, the firefox package probably should not go into main,
defeating the whole purpose of all this.

Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu