* Gervase Markham (gerv@mozilla.org) wrote: > Eric Dorland wrote: > >Before I get to them, one of the interesting things pointed out in one > >of the threads is that the Trademark License might be more onerous > >then what trademark law (at least in the US) allows. Now, they're your > >trademarks, and I have every intention of respecting your wishes when > >it comes to using them. It may not paint the Mozilla Foundation in a > >good light if you are indeed trying to impose more restrictions than > >trademarks allow. > > Trademark law varies much more than copyright law between jurisdictions. > I have not intentionally attempted to overreach the scope of trademark > law. In any case, with the recent modification, the document is a > permissions grant under whatever trademark law is in effect, rather than > a contract. So I hope this won't be an issue. I was speaking more in terms of the Trademark License rather then the agreement you're trying to make with Debian. > >Now then, I personally will not accept any deal that is Debian > >specific. > > Absolutely reasonable - it would be entirely against DFSG #8. Umm, I don't understand. You'd like to make a deal but you recognize that we can't under DFSG #8? That seems very paradoxical to me. > >Whether or not this is actually against DFSG #8 or not is > >beside the point, I don't want to play if it's only because we're the > >popular kid. This problem goes beyond Debian. Other distributions are > >not going to be able to use the trademark license as written. Are you > >going to cut deals with Fedora, Slackware and Gentoo as well? > > Absolutely. Ubuntu have already been in touch, and are watching the > discussion closely. And I worked out a deal with Gentoo several months ago. And what were the specifics of the deal you reached with Gentoo? It seems Gentoo would be a big problem for your QA issues since Gentoo is designed to allow you to compile it with crazy optimizations. > >They're > >probably more likely to want to deal than us, but does that mean the > >little distros don't get to use the trademarks because they're not > >worth striking a deal with? > > I'm open to talking to anyone. I'm hoping that what comes out of this > discussion is a fairly general trademark permission that we can execute > with anyone who convinces us that they aren't going to ship rubbish with > our name on. Right, but the fact is they need to seek you out to get that permission, rather than it being in the Trademark License itself. Define exactly what constitutes "rubbish" in the trademark license, and allow anyone who is !"rubbish" to use your trademark. > >The reason trademarks like the TeX one are more palatable is that > >there's a set of technical requirements and as long as you meet them > >you get to use the mark. You've already sort of done that with the > >Community Edition licensing, but you haven't gone far enough for what > >a distro is going to need: > > > >* Applying security fixes > >* Back porting bug fixes > >* Making distro specific integration changes > > Would you prefer a set of technical requirements? I haven't gone down > that path precisely because of the large number of DFSG issues it would > immediately raise. I'm not sure why that would cause DFSG difficulties, it would still only apply to trademark. It would be wonderful if you could define in technical terms what it means to be "Firefox" and allow anyone who meets those requirements to use the name. > In contrast, my proposal contains provisions for all of the things in > your bulleted list. It's really very hands-off. Right, but your proposal is Debian specific. It needs to be a more general proposal that can be included in the Trademark License so that anyone can abide by them. > >* The Trademark License is finalized (right now it still says version > > 0.7 draft, so I don't consider it in any way binding). > > We hope to have a final version in the next few weeks. But if changing > the package names requires a long lead time, then perhaps it would be in > everyone's interest to get that particular ball rolling. Well I have not attempted it yet, so I'm not sure how much lead time it would require, but probably something on the order of two weeks would probably be necessary. But I'd still like everyone to see the final version before we make such a final decision. -- Eric Dorland <eric.dorland@mail.mcgill.ca> ICQ: #61138586, Jabber: hooty@jabber.com 1024D/16D970C6 097C 4861 9934 27A0 8E1C 2B0A 61E9 8ECF 16D9 70C6 -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GCS d- s++: a-- C+++ UL+++ P++ L++ E++ W++ N+ o K- w+ O? M++ V-- PS+ PE Y+ PGP++ t++ 5++ X+ R tv++ b+++ DI+ D+ G e h! r- y+ ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
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