Re: trademark licenses and DFSG: a summary
Uoti Urpala <uoti.urpala@pp1.inet.fi>
> Craig Small <csmall <at> debian.org> writes:
> > 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.
Debian is an operating system. Once released good, it will stay
good forever, so I don't see why can't we trust it?
> 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.
Why the devil not? We expect a blanket copyright licence that allows
everything except a few sacred acts (stripping attribution, for
example). Also, we expect to apply the DFSG to copyright requirements
which are worse by default (no rights for users). Trademarks have to
be actively made into problems, which shows rather more intent to
attack downstream than copyright.
> [...] 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.
I think that's conflating two things. A Debian-specific trademark
licence would not be agreeable because it would hinder downstream
distributions.
A trademark licence specific to a particular version of a package
might be acceptable under the DFSG (unsure about DFSG 3: it would
allow modifications and distribution under the same terms, but it
would not meet the TM terms, so would have to be renamed and
distributed under terms that required not to use the original name -
is this OK? Not sure. Seems easier to rename anyway) but I suspect
most maintainers would see it as too much of a pain to manage. It
risks having to rename in future anyway if upstream gets annoyed, so
why not rename before submitting it to NEW?
Ultimately, what are restrictive trademark licensors trying to do
besides restrict the freedom of downstream users to adapt the software
to their needs and share it with their friends?
Regards,
--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
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