On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 10:51 AM, RA Stehmann <anw...@rechtsanwalt-stehmann.de> wrote: > Am 07.02.2013 13:26, schrieb janI: > >> If it is so classic, then for sure the ASF laywers could inform Fedora >> about the problem, and ask them to correct it, independently of whether or >> not AOO is distribtuted. I assume that since they are the distributors they >> need to make sure that their contributors uses valid trademarks. >> >> This might be a problem on other distros as well. >> >> Or is life not as simple as I think ? >> > No, it isn't. > > It isn't really nice to sue another free software project. >
Please don't put words in anyone's mouth. No one, other than you, mentioned suing. One value of lawyers is that they know how to craft a letter that *does not* escalate things by implying a lawsuit. This is important. > And using trademarks to break another free software projects will, seems > no good idea nor a good public relation since Mozilla tried it. See: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded_by_the_Debian_project > > Because of the licence it's quite easy to fork and rebrand AOO, so we've > to be carefully to guard and promote our brand and save the respect of > our project in the free software community. > And part of guarding the brand is to ensure that trademarks are not used without permission. We must require permission for the trademarks to be used. This is not a requirement we can ignore. But this does not mean that we encourage another Iceweasel thing. That does not logically follow, because we're only talking about the requirement to **ask permission**. The 2nd half of this is that when asked, we be very reasonable and grant permission for uses that are reasonable, supports the community, don't confuse the user, acknowledges the trademark, etc. We've granted permission to use the trademark dozens of times since the OpenOffice project came to Apache. -Rob > Regards > Michael >
