On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 04:16:46AM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote: > On Thu, 09 Dec 2010, Ibrahim Haddad wrote: > > To start with, the goal is to avoid any confusion around what is and > > what is not MeeGo. Anything that is or will become associated with > > the MeeGo trademark has to be in conformance with the compliance > > program. > Unfortunately, there's no way that Debian can possibly comply with the > compliance specification as written. [I only got as far as §2.3 to > find an obvious deal-breaker.] > This sounds like yet another case where an unbranded name[1] is > required for actual use in the community, ala iceweasel. This situation is not analogous to the iceweasel case. For iceweasel, there was a copyright license on the graphics included in firefox that imposed trademark-like restrictions; so under the DFSG the graphics had to go, and the maintainer took the decision to also rename the package at the same time. But for Meego, there don't appear to be any such trademark-like copyright license provisions. Over the years there have been a large number of packages in the archive for software whose upstream has a trademark on their name, none of whom have granted open-ended licenses to use these trademarks. We nevertheless have always made a practice of using those names unmodified as package names and binary names, on the grounds that these are interfaces that are *not subject to trademark*. This is why, whereas RedHat ships packages of 'httpd', Debian has always had packages of 'apache' even though the Apache trademark license clearly states that modified versions of the software may not use the mark. The trademark license is only relevant if we're doing something that's in scope for trademark law in the first place! This is not a position we should back down from as a project without some very specific legal counsel about the risks and a *consensual* decision *as a project* to change our handling of trademark claims. Maintainers going it alone to ask upstreams for trademark permission, as in this case, erode Debian's overall position on trademarks vs. package and file names. Please don't do this. Far from "playing it safe" legally, you're instead putting at risk the work of all those other maintainers who have put countless hours into integrating around the standard upstream names. Thanks, -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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