Re: What the DFSG really says about trademarks
Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> wrote:
> You appear to have raised a valid point, in that we (the bulk of the DDs in
> the UK [1]) are intent upon [...]
Where "bulk" is about 7 DDs out of 70+. Not only were other UK
DDs not involved, but many of them probably haven't been told
of this business being set up in their name.
> To that end, we've set up a society:
> http://wiki.earth.li/DebianUKSociety
> the primary purpose of which is to allow us to open a bank account to hold
> the mentioned funds.
That disagrees with the stated primary purpose: "The purpose of
the society is to promote Debian and Free Software in general."
> That being the case, I (as the society's current chairman) would like to
> formally request a license to use the Debian trademark in the context of
> the Debian UK Society, and it's associated bank account.
The "in the context of the Debian UK Society" bit seems very broad.
I remind you of Phil's earlier words:
>>> To present it as a fait accomplis was bound to cause bad feeling
>>> [...] -- either way I don't see how we can trust them to be
>>> issuing statements which will be perceived by
>>> the world to have come from the project.
and I ask you to apply his own judgement:
>>> We should clearly protect our users from the confusion that the [...]
>>> name is bound to cause by issuing a cease & desist letter forthwith.
Maybe that will cause Debian-UK to become a debian subproject
and/or to become a narrower-purpose fundholding-only operation.
Regards,
--
MJR (slef)
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