On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 09:53:32AM +0100, Martin Quinson wrote: > I think I understand your point of view, and I really appreciate your > moderation here as I like to be moderated myself when possible. > I have an additional question here: is this position really the best > to protect our downstreams? What will we do if Canonical get > "over-enthusiastic" against a Debian derivative that is e.g. not > Ubuntu-based? > I agree that the question may be completely artificial at this point, > but I think that ensuring that there is no legal threat over Debian > derivative (neither now nor in the future) is a neat goal for our > ecosystem. This hypothetical situation isn't a legal threat in the first place, it's an extralegal one. The case under scrutiny here is a domain name that referenced the trademark; and even that, everyone agrees, is a case for which Canonical's response was the wrong one. There's no real risk of Canonical going after Debian derivatives over something as far removed from the domain of trademark law as references to 'Ubuntu' within the distribution. This thread isn't about risk mitigation. It's about trying to punish Canonical for what was perceived as an attempt to suppress criticism on the Internet (but which was in fact nothing of the sort). If a Debian derivative started calling itself, e.g., "Debuntu", then of course that becomes a trademark infringement matter that Canonical would need to address. But that's nothing to do with the contents of Debian, and it's not something that Debian could prevent. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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