Hi Gervase, On Thu, Sep 01, 2011 at 01:03:02PM +0100, Gervase Markham wrote: > On 29/08/11 15:18, Ben Finney wrote: > >> then effectively Debian policy is that no trademarks may appear > >> anywhere in Debian. The purpose of trademarks in law is as a > >> determinant of origin. > > What in DFSG §8 (or in my explanation of it) makes this infeasible, in > > your view? > If you understand DFSG §8 to apply to trademarks, then the right to use > a trademark to identify the software must be offered to those outside > Debian. But we do not regard DFSG 8 as applying to trademarks. There is an explicit exemption in the DFSG that software may require a name change when modified. > Debian also requires that software not be subject to restrictions on its > modification (DFSG §3). These two principles combine to say that the the > software, arbitrarily modified, must still be permitted to bear the > trademark. As any software can be incrementally transformed into any > other software, this effectively means the mark can be used on any > software at all. > I suspect you don't agree with that, so where is my logic wrong? > You could argue that trademark holders can grant the right to use the > trademark to Debian for the exact Debian version, and to everyone else > for the exact Debian version, and so everyone actually has equal rights. > But in practice, either this means that the trademark holder needs to > approve all changes Debian makes (which is generally unacceptable to > Debian, I understand) or the trademark holder says "OK, Debian, I trust > you, make modifications" - at which point, the licence becomes specific > to Debian again and you are back behind §8. For the specific case of firefox, which is the only instance I'm aware of in which an upstream has ever insisted on such a strict interpretation of their rights wrt trademarks of free software, the maintainer of that package made a conscious decision to change the package name because *from the start* there would be a change that the trademark holder did not approve of: removing the logos that were included with a non-free copyright license. I don't think I can draw any conclusions about whether Debian would *generally* find it unacceptable to use a trademark where all changes to the package must be signed off by the mark holder. The one real-world example we have to date clearly involved terms that were not acceptable. But I believe a trademark license that left Debian free to apply security fixes and fixes for bugs with the integration with the OS without requiring prior sign-off by the mark holder would almost certainly be acceptable to Debian. Cheers, -- 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
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature