Re: mozilla thunderbird trademark restrictions / still dfsg free?
On Sat, 08 Jan 2005, Gervase Markham wrote:
> Don Armstrong wrote:
> >I know if I were maintaining it, I would be very worried that the
> >trademark license would be pulled or similar, and I would be in the
> >very wierd position of trying to pull the packages from a stable
> >release and dealing with all of the problems that that would cause for
> >the users of the packages.
>
> I don't think we'd have a problem with a system whereby once a
> stable release was done, we couldn't withdraw permission for that
> release (given Debian's existing policy of just doing security
> updates to stable releases).
I didn't mean to sound like the Mozilla Foundation would willfully do
something that nefarious. However, unlike the common Free Software
licenses, the trademark licenses proposed by MF are revocable at any
time. For example, if MF's counsel decided that the trademark
agreements weren't set up correctly to preserve the mark, something
else caused Mozilla to need to revisit the terms of the trademark
agreements, or Mozilla Foundation got tired of hearing about issues
affecting ancient mozilla versions, and wanted to pull the mark
because it no longer lived up to the quality standards of a current
mozilla release.
Without an irrevocable trademark license, I at least, would be very
cautious about using the marks in the Debian package, given that
Mozilla appears to be interested in prosecuting non-Mozilla use of the
marks.
Don Armstrong
--
Identical parts aren't.
-- Beach's Law
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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