On Mon, 2011-10-10 at 18:11 -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: > On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 09:11:21AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote: > > Le Sun, Oct 09, 2011 at 08:02:01PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli a écrit : > > > > My own proposal, that I submit to your consideration, is as follows: > > > > - DFSG applies to copyright license; trademark restrictions should not > > > make a package DFSG non-free (philosophical part) > > > > - however, trademark restrictions that get in the way of "usual Debian > > > procedures" should not be accepted in the Debian archive (practical > > > part) > > > The DFSG stem from our Social Contract, where they are introduced as a > > tool to determine if a work is free. We can decide that they apply to > > copyright licenses only, and that would leave on our archive > > administrators the burden of determining if a trademark license is free. > > No, it would not, because *Debian is not in the practice of licensing > trademarks*. > > The controlling principle is that we are not trading on the names of the > upstream works and as a result we have no need of a license - so it doesn't > matter what kind of hare-brained restrictions upstreams include in their > trademark licenses because we don't need a license. > > A trademark license is a license to use a *brand*, not a license on a work > of software. Those brands may appear in: - Desktop or menu items used to start programs - Splash screens and 'About' dialogs - Release announcements and other promotional material listing prominent programs included in Debian So we certainly make claims that Debian contains $brand_x, and that the program a user launches is $brand_y. If the programs in question are unmodified, I think we can reasonably claim that we are using their trademarks in a descriptive way, which is fair use (depending, of course, on jurisdiction). But if they are modified in any significant way, I don't believe we can rely on that. And we want to maintain our freedom to modify programs as we see fit. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings If at first you don't succeed, you're doing about average.
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