Re: Trademarks: what is the line?

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit Gervase Markham <gerv@mozilla.org>

> I should point out that changing the name of Firefox and Thunderbird
> is designed to be easy. Netscape does it with the suite to make
> Netscape, after all. There's a central branding file or two where you
> change the name once and it's picked up almost everywhere.

That sounds good.

But I'm not sure that it will solve the problem with regards to
Debian's *package names*. Debian's packaging system does not make it
as easy to change the names of the binary packages produced by a
source package. On the contrary, the binary package names are used as
identifiers in many places to connect the pieces of packaing
infrastructure that goes into the binary packages.

Of course this is not in any way Mozilla's fault, but it is a factor
Debian has to take into consideration when deciding its course of
action. It will not do our users any good that it is easy to change
the branding in the upstream sources if it is tedious to make a
matching (and required) change of names in the packaging scripts.

-- 
Henning Makholm                     "However, the fact that the utterance by
                           Epimenides of that false sentence could imply the
           existence of some Cretan who is not a liar is rather unsettling."