[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [...] > Trademarks exist to protect consumers by marking products as having > come from an identified source. Debian taking Firefox and hacking on > the code but still releasing it under the Firefox trademark clearly > breaks this. And it breaks it for the consumer, not for the Mozilla > Foundation.
That isn't a reasonable argument because that the debian project changes the code less than other people who are still allowed to release under the Firefox trademark. If debian breaks it for the consumer, it is also broken by others. See Mike Hommey's analysis "Facts about Debian, Mozilla® Firefox® and Ubuntu" http://web.glandium.org/blog/?p=99 But the debian project released in the past with some important patches from Mozilla quicker than Mozilla themselves, offered support for longer than Mozilla offer support for their editions and used to be allowed to release as Firefox, before MozCorp replaced MoFo. At one point, some people (I forget their affiliations) were suggesting that the trademarks mean debian should not include a /usr/bin/firefox (or /etc/alternatives/firefox or similar), which would mean patching more things. But this is merely a specific case to illustrate: trademarks are used to interfere with the permissions granted by GPL. > You cannot use trademarks to prevent modification of software in the > same way as copyright or as patents. Trademarks are therefore not the > same potential or actual threat as patents. You can remove them, > although it may be very inconvenient to do so. [...] While not as restrictive as copyrights, trademarks have been used to prevent modification of configurations and to tie Free-copyright software to proprietary-copyright software. Submarine trademarks like Firefox, Ion and maybe others, where the terms are changed after the name gets popular, are a growing problem. Sometimes you can remove them only if you remove other things as well as the name. Patents cannot be used on software at all here. It's disappointing if software patent problems are being exported to us by GPLv3. Why is one a licence issue when the more widespread problem is not? I feel that GPLv3 should be a copyright licence, not an IP one. Hope that explains, -- MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Experienced webmaster-developers for hire http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ Also: statistician, sysadmin, online shop builder, workers co-op. Writing on koha, debian, sat TV, Kewstoke http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
