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Re: Firefox/Thunderbird trademarks: a proposal



Gervase Markham wrote:

yes, for main this is definitly true. For non-free it would be your decision to allow it (or deny) and our decision to do it (if technically possible at all). So if you allow other distributions to distribute the original icons (i don't know if you really do that or want it), I think this would be a good indicator that this can be true for debian non-free too.


I must have missed something; when did we get onto discussing non-free? While I'm a bit behind in the discussion and there are some points to take up, I haven't seen any violent objections to my last proposal about getting into main. That's still what we're working towards on this side, at least.

I am referring to the hint of Henning Makholm [1]. Just to give you a brief summary:

He pointed out that it might be in MF hands (and I am sure you will do it) to make the rebranding of your software trivial. But as soon as you take a look at what that means for the debian package system this cannot be achieved that easily. As Henning pointed out, the burden we would put on downstream users and distributors by going the restricted way (as proposed by you), is just too much to put it into main. Fixing this in debian is unlikely to happen either [2]. So the only way out of this is to not contaminate main and to not stop distributing a firefox package by:

1. packaging weasel packages for main
2. putting a brand (extension) package named firefox in non-free.

In this way, users that use non-free will be able to install a branded firefox that has gone through our standard QA process.


[1] - http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/01/msg00737.html
[2] - personally i would not object doing this, but I do not think there is an easy way to change it. Further, being a realist, I do not think that I could convince people responsible for that to do that in the near future :) ... so here _we_ are stuck.

p.s. s/firefox/firefox\/thunderbird/g

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