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Re: trademark licenses and DFSG: a summary



On Du, 19 feb 12, 19:56:11, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> Stefano Zacchiroli <leader <at> debian.org> writes:
> > - Debian should neither seek nor accept trademark licenses that are
> >   specific to the Debian Project.
> > 
> >   (Suggested by Steve Langasek. In addition to Steve's reasoning, I
> >   think that doing otherwise would go against the underlying principle
> >   of DFSG §8 "License Must Not Be Specific to Debian".)
> 
> I think this one is questionable. Ideally, a trademark is about trust - it tells
> the user that the product meets the quality requirements of the trademark owner.
> A trademark owner may trust the processes used by the Debian project to produce
> results that meet their quality criteria, and may be able to monitor the
> versions actually released by Debian and withdraw the right to use the trademark
> should Debian change in a direction that harms users. There's no way a trademark
> owner would trust random people or organizations they don't even know about, nor
> is it possible to maintain quality control over those. Thus, I think it would
> make sense to have arrangements allowing Debian specifically to modify the
> software in ways deemed necessary by the project without asking permission for
> each individual change. Downstreams would have to either distribute the code
> unchanged, seek a similar arrangement with the trademark owner, or rebrand.

This would be a major pain for derived distributions, as they would not 
be able to rely on Debian main to be redistributable (with changes) as 
is.

Kind regards,
Andrei
-- 
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