Re: Request for official help
MENGUAL Jean-Philippe writes ("Re: Request for official help"):
> Le 25/07/2017 à 20:36, Ian Jackson a écrit :
> > Henrique, can you please point me to the documentation about these
> > exemption letters ? I continue to think that this is perhaps the
> > right route, but that your proposed letter wording is backwards.
>
> Probably, hence my submission to the community.
Right.
> ok but this approach enables to ask a more fundamental question then. Is
> Debian a trademark?
Yes.
> If it is, Debian is the manufacturer of the Debian
> ISOs, and then of the OS.
An "ISO" is a file, not a physical object. "The OS" is a collection
of data. Debian is the originator of the Debian image ISOs and of the
Debian operating system. But because ISOs, and the Debian operating
system, are not physical objects, they are not manufactured. There is
no manufacturer.
Physical DVDs containing a copy of the Debian ISOs *are* physical
objects. Their manufacturers are the people who arrange for, or
perform, the production of those physical objects (eg by burning the
DVD, or mass-producing them in presses, or whatever).
Debian has publicly licenced its trademark. We give our legal
permission for the name "Debian" to be applied to such physical
objects when they are sold.
> So it should have EANs to enable others to
> sell its OS on their support. If it is not, it means that, for example,
> Hypra could say: Hypra is a trademark (there is all a pocess for it in
> Amazon). From this trademark, we sell Debian products, which are from us
> (manufacturer) and then we can ust freely the trademark. And sell hen
> Debian-Hypra for example, eg Debian OS+DVD costomized by Hypra on their box.
I don't understand the connection between EANs and trademarks.
Does Amazon's EAN system assume that the manufacturer of goods is
always the same person as the trademark holder ?
> > So I think the "right" way for the EAN system to operate in this case,
> > if it is to be operated at all, is for each manufacturer to get a
> > different EAN for each product. If manufacturers find registering
> > with the EAN system too cumbersome then surely we can look into using
> > our institutional resources to help.
>
> The only problem of this is that payment is needed and I have to say I
> am not fan of paying for EANs.
Something like the EAN system probably costs money to administer. We
pay for domain names and things too. If the payment is too large for
a single vendor to be economic maybe we can effectively amortise it
across multiple vendors.
> > Can someone show us the agreement we (or SPI or FFIS or some other TO)
> > would have to sign if we were to become an issuer of EANs ? Perhaps
> > we can simply do that and have an easy way for a Debian vendor to get
> > an EAN from our allocation.
>
> Debian can subscribe each year, for 85 euros, to gs1.org (we need to
> choose the country we want). Plus 100 euros, just once. It enables to:
> - have an access to 100 or more EANs
>
> 85 euros is the anual cost for the organizations with less than 500K of
> budget.
I think Debian's annual expenditure is less than that, but it might
depend on whether we count Debconf. I'm sure we could afford Eur85
per year. I don't know whether we would have more than 100
organisations who would want EANs for Debian merchandise, but if we
did I think we could consider it a success and pay more money.
> cf http://gs1.org for more information
Can you please provide deep links to the relevant pages ?
(Also, what a horrible website. Almost unreadable for me due to
pale-grey-onwhite disease, and at least some kind of
probably-cookie-related redirect breakage.)
Ian.
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