El Jueves 16 Junio 2005 18:11, Russ Allbery escribió: [snip] > That being said, we absolutely should not allow the trademark issue to > give MoFo any more of a veto on package changes than any other upstream > would have. If we feel we need to make a change to improve the package > for our users and MoFo disagrees with that change and says we can't use > the trademark if we make it, we should make it, rebrand Firefox, and go on > with our lives. Debian as a project already tries to work with upstream > whenever possible, and certainly we should continue to do this, but I'm > *extremely* uncomfortable with the idea of this trademark license being > used as a stick to prevent Debian from producing the distribution we want > to produce. > > The most disturbing thing I've seen in this entire thread so far (and I'm > trying not to overreact, since I don't know the whole story) is hearing > that Mozilla might veto root CA additions using the trademark liense as a > stick. I think it's a horrible idea to rebrand Firefox out of worries of > avoiding a Debian-specific deal, but if the branding ends up being used > for things like supporting the evil Verisign monopoly against more > reasonable ways of handling TLS certificates, it would be worth rebranding > to me to avoid having to wait on those sorts of changes. On the other > hand, if that statement was just a security concern and a request that > MoFo be given time to vet new CA additions before they're just added > downstream, that's probably quite reasonable and the invocation of the > trademark license stick may have just been a poor choice of wording on > their part.
Hi! While I've been actively supporting to don't rename Firefox during all the thread (because of the reason explained there), I definitely DO support to rename it if keeping the original name means that we loose the ability to make some kind of changes to the package, and specifically I support to rename it if Eric Dorland (as maintaner) doesn't feel free enough to modify the package when appropiate (as in that example of CA additions). Until the moment, I thought all the time that MoFo was trusting Debian and therefore we were allowed to make any changes we considered appropiate. Anyway, I'd like bring again the Debian example that I wrote and nobody replied. I was not joking. Consider: "What happens if tomorrow I start redistributing a modifyed Debian version (only bugfixes; of course, I will decide what bugs are for me...) and I call it "Debian GNU/Linux Sarge 3.1"? Will I have a trademark issue with SPI?" Almost for sure, I'll have a problem with SPI and the Debian trademark. If the criteria expressed by some in this thread is true, we ** should rename Debian ** because we are using a right that our users can't use (we can ship Debian with the name "Debian" because we are Debian, so it it is a special right that our users can't access). I think this is totally absurd and illustrates that trademarks have nothing to do with software freedom, and we should accept this kind of name limitations. Regards, César
