On Sun, Oct 09, 2011 at 08:02:01PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> as recent events have shown, we need to discuss our general stance on
> trademarks and the impact that trademark licenses (should) have on the
> content of the Debian archive.
Let's resurrect this.
We seem to have one big missing ingredient to proceed in this
discussion. Namely, we lack "competent legal advice" --- as Steve put it
--- on which kind of restrictions trademark law will impose on us. There
is a doubt about what "default" trademark restrictions will allow us to
modify in a software that contains some trademark encumbered material.
I'll seek such an advice via SPI lawyers and let you know.
In the meantime, there is an independent part of the discussion that can
proceed in its own right (and that, TBH, I'm a bit surprised has stopped
so quickly). Let's proactively assume the following "reasonable"
outcome of the legal advice I'm going to seek:
- we are allowed (by trademark law) to ship unmodified copies of
trademark encumbered material
- we are required to change trademark encumbered material which is
user-visible [1] in case we change something in the software that
might affect its functionalities (potentially any functional change)
According to my reading of the thread thus far, it seems to me we can
have consensus in considering the above fine wrt DFSG, thanks to the
*spirit* of DFSG §4, even though its *letter* was written to only take
into account "differnt name or version number".
Your comments are most welcome.
Cheers.
[1] I'm trying to exclude with this requirement stuff like path names
--
Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o
Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o
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