On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 01:23:33AM +0100, Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo wrote: > But trademarks are strict and not free by default. If I can use a > trademark to name my own products when they don't belong to me, it is no > longer a trademark.
Sure. A trademark license that's "free"--when evaluated as if it was a copyright license, say--is probably lost, which is where the claim that "enforcable trademarks can't be Free" comes from. What I'm not sure about is whether, and when, this is a problem. Debian clearly allows copyright licenses to say "if you modify this software, change the name". What's the problem with implementing that same restriction with a trademark (which is the "correct" way of doing it, anyway)? It's a little more complicated, conceptually, since instead of evaluating a work and its license, we're evaluating a work with a name, the work's license, and the name's license, but at a high level it doesn't seem any different. Now, from another perspective: if Debian needs to modify Mozilla in a way that would cause other parties (doing the same thing) to have to rename it, Debian shouldn't be shipping it as "Mozilla" (even if special permission is given). That means that a competing fork of Debian would be placed at a disadvantage, having to rename packages away from their familiar names; it feels like a DFSG#8 problem (as has been mentioned), though exactly how isn't quite clear. We can look at the same thing from a copyright standpoint, to avoid having to talk about trademarks, which are somewhat less well-explored here. A license can say "if you modify this, you must rename it". The Debian package modifies the package, but the upstream author says "Debian's cool, don't bother renaming it". What does Debian do? The license--even without the special permission--is DFSG-free. The additional permission doesn't change that. Debian can either accept the additional permission and not rename it (but getting an "unfair advantage against forks" in the process), or rename it anyway. What happens? -- Glenn Maynard
