nicolas vigier a écrit :

On Thu, 17 Mar 2011, andre999 wrote:

Romain d'Alverny a écrit :

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 10:51, nicolas vigier<bo...@mars-attacks.org>   wrote:
On Fri, 11 Mar 2011, Romain d'Alverny wrote:
Wasn''t there a license change regarding the Firefox logo in the end
of 2010, that was related to this?

Yes :
http://glandium.org/blog/?p=933

Right, thanks. But that doesn't solve the trademark usage issue,
actually. So the question is still open.

Romain

First of all, for a short period of time Mozilla seemed to require special
permission to do _any_ redistribution based on Mozilla source code, a

No, they required permissions only when using their trademark. The
source code is free software, and can be used without permission.

Ok. I should have added "without changing the name". But that seems to have been a misunderstanding, anyway.

situation which was a response to commercial sites grossly abusing Mozilla
software, essentially defrauding end-users in the name of Mozilla.
Subsequently they clarified their policy (but forgot to update their site
for a while.)
(The iceweavel project, created in reaction to this problem, died shortly
after Mozilla clarified their policy.)

The iceweavel project is still alive, and still used in Debian at the
moment, so it did not die shortly after Mozilla clarified their policy.

I was going by posts of a number of contributors to the project. So the phoenix is alive ... :)

And Mozilla did not change their policy. What they changed is the license
of the logo, which was not available under a free license but is now
available under the MPL, GPL or LGPL license (but still protected by
trademark, which is different than copyright).

Which is the policy I was referring to ...

According to their site, the clarified policy says essentially that
as long as
1) we don't modify the source code (other than applying Mozilla-originated
patches, which we can do by updating from their cvs), and
2) we don't charge for the code,
we can redistribute Mozilla products using the name, trademarks and logos.

The "don't charge" is only for Unaltered Binaries distribution.

It is under the "unaltered binaries" heading, but includes compiled unmodified source code, which need not contain the installer.
(A version without installer has always been available.)

Since source code can be downloaded from Mozilla cvs, where patches are available, much if not all code needed could come from directly from Mozilla. Thus meeting Mozilla trademark conditions, without requiring special permission.
However it doesn't hurt to confirm ...

As far as I know, Mandriva has never modified the source code, other than
applying Mozilla security patches.  And I don't see us at Mageia wanting to
do so either.

As already said, our package includes some small patches :
http://svnweb.mageia.org/packages/cauldron/firefox/current/SOURCES/

Ok.  How much of that is not available directly from Mozilla ?

Maybe we should get permission anyway, but I think it would be a good idea to submit any patches upstream, and pull (especially security) patches from Mozilla cvs. (cvs will evidently be a lot more uptodate than releases - sometimes by several months, as they finish more critical security fixes.)

Then we won't have a problem being out of sync, with a lot more patches to maintain. Even if a patch comes from Fedora or elsewhere, we could still send it upstream first. This will affect Firefox a lot more than Seamonkey, which is usually a step behind. (letting Firefox squash the bugs :) )

--
André

Reply via email to