Re: trademark licenses and DFSG: a summary
Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu <at> gmail.com> writes:
> On Du, 19 feb 12, 19:56:11, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> > 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.
They could not rely on that without Debian-specific trademark licenses
either. The original proposal said "For trademark encumbered software
that could at a given point in time be distributed without rebranding,
maintainers should carefully evaluate the risk of having to rebrand
them later on". Thus it would allow software that requires rebranding
after changes (at least changes that Debian itself considers
unreasonable and thus ignored in the risk assessment mentioned).
If you still want to ban such Debian-specific licenses, what about
software that would be considered OK to distribute even without the
extra Debian-specific permissions? Say something is considered
acceptable to distribute using the original name with a permission to
apply strict security fixes only. Should a Debian-specific permission
to apply other changes deemed useful for distro integration be
rejected? What if upstream gives such a permission to the people
currently in the Debian maintainer team rather than to Debian? Would
they be expected to refrain from using that right (and instead bug
upstream for separate permission for each change)?
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