On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 02:31:35PM +0200, Benj. Mako Hill wrote: > <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. Out of curiosity, does Debian's trademark policy currently say anything about use of the Debian mark by customized Debian distributions (in contrast with Debian derivatives)? Everything I've seen on the subject indicates to me that this "DCC" will be a CDD (that was fun to say), which will in turn be used as a base by Progeny, Xandros, etc. for value-added solutions. Since CDDs *are* Debian (i.e., a strict subset of the packages that we ship, together with optional config/install glue), I think it's in our interest that they also be called Debian. Of course, I don't think this automatically extends to products that anyone is building *around* Debian or around a CDD. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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