<quote who="Florian Weimer" date="Sun, Jul 24, 2005 at 10:13:06AM +0200"> > How is Debian related to the "Debian Core Consortium"? Why are they > using the name "Debian"? > > In principle, I don't have anything against Debian spinoffs, but > they shouldn't use confusing names that suggest they are more Debian > than Debian itself (or something like that). > > Or is this something Debian plans to be affiliated with in an > official manner? You are correct. This very well may be a trademark issue. We've asked other people to change their names in similar situations in the past. This particular case was actually raised with Jeff Licquia from Progeny last week at Debconf (I can't remember by who) and I brought it up briefly with Greg Pomerantz (SPI's lawyer and long-time trademark guru) after the meeting. I think we should defer to Greg on how to handle this. For those that don't know, "Debian" is a registered trademark. This means that a group of us decided a number of years ago to keep consumers (and developers) from being confused by ensuring that "Debian" referred only to our project and to our products. As a result, derivatives (i.e., projects which are no longer Debian) cannot call themselves "Debian" because it is incorrect and confusing. There are alternatives that some people support (e.g., allowing anyone to call anything Debian) but we've decided not to pursue that path at the moment. In the future, you should CC spi-trademark@lists.spi-inc.org on this sort of mail. While members of the SPI trademark committee certainly read this list, our lawyer does not. I'm CCing SPI trademark and the SPI board on this message. Regards, Mako -- Benjamin Mako Hill mako@debian.org http://mako.cc/
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