Sorry for dropping this a while back, we didn't have enough bandwidth to
track this down...
Eric Dorland wrote:
To my knowledge, each patchset that deviates from what we ship should be
run by whoever is doing licensing approvals (this is in progress with
various distributions already). Its hard, if not impossible, to define
a set of guidelines that is crystal clear and doesn't need human
oversight. Novell and Red Hat already do this.
Did you read what Steve said? We've been give permission to use the
Firefox trademark by the Mozilla Foundation, and it's there job to
police whether we're using it as a "mark of quality" or what not.
Since its inception (September 2005), Mozilla Corporation has been
handling approvals. The way this works (and the way Red Hat and Novell
have already gone through the process for 1.0 and 1.5) is that you have
to submit patches that deviate from the source tarballs in order to
continue to use the trademark.
This is us attempting to tell you that what you are doing is not correct
and needs to change. We also need to go over the rest of the patchset,
but this is the most glaring issue that must be fixed. This came back
up again when people realized Ubuntu has the same change, and because of
the way in which you did this, anyone shipping a derivative of Debian
will get the trademarked name even when not building with official
branding off. To repeat, this is not acceptable, and we need to work
together to find an appropriate solution.
The key problem is that there is code, and a build switch, that
explicitly handles the official branding/logos vs. the generic
name/artwork, and the package maintainer has chosen to break this switch
by making the unofficial side of the switch also label itself as
Firefox. I don't understand the motivations here, since the changelog I
saw isn't visible (packages.debian.org is still being weird) but the
gist of it was "avoid using the official branding switch" which seems
like one of those "makes it harder to undo" steps since people actually
would have to change code instead of build options to not be bound by
those terms. If users don't build with the official branding, its
because they are not accepting the terms of using things bound up in
trademark law. Doing things this way implies that only the artwork is
part of the official branding, as opposed to the name as well.
I had to break the switch, because I need to call it Firefox, but I
can't include the official graphics.
I've confirmed that this isn't acceptable usage of the trademark. If
you are going to use the Firefox name, you must also use the rest of the
branding.
Why can't you just use the official branding switch, anyway?
Because it uses graphics which have a non-free copyright license.
This is not something where you are free to pick what parts you want to
use. Either use the trademarked logos and name together or don't. The
name is trademarked in the exact same way as the logo, so I fail to see
how you can argue that one is acceptable to use and the other is not.
Maybe there's a technicality, but the name is just as free as the logos...
-- Mike
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