Re: trademark licenses and DFSG: a summary
Craig Small <csmall <at> debian.org> writes:
> "tentacles of evil" problem. Trademark isn't all about trust, it's
> also about control. We, unfortunately, cannot ignore it but we have
> to deal with it our way.
>
> All of the sections in the DFSG are important. We could of, when
> framing the DFSG, gone the easy path and not had a section 8 but we
> didn't. To me the requirements that we will not accept a
You can't trust entities like Debian to stay "good" forever. The only
practical way to maintain trust is to maintain some degree of control.
You can't enumerate all the possible kinds of badness you'd want to
forbid, and then grant a blanket trademark license to everyone
allowing everything else.
You seem to have ignored or failed to understand what I said about
DFSG vs trademarks. You really can't expect to apply DFSG to trademark
requirements. That say Firefox is distributed under a DFSG-free
license means that any idiot who thinks it's a great idea to create a
browser that replaces all web page pictures with Goatse images is free
to use Firefox code to achieve his goal. However, trademarks are meant
to protect against him calling the result Firefox. "Firefox" is not a
browser that replaces all images with Goatse pictures. Trademarks are
supposed to show that DFSG freedoms have not been exercised; it makes
no sense to require ability to use them in a DFSG-free manner.
If you want to allow doing all modifications permitted by the DFSG
(which includes obnoxious ones) without the effort of rebranding, then
you must remove all use of trademarks from Debian, including the
Debian trademark itself. No trademark license can allow using the same
trademark with arbitrarily modified versions without rendering the
trademark completely meaningless. If you accept that some changes may
require users to do rebranding anyway, then I see no fundamental
objection to some forms of Debian-specific trademark licenses.
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