Steve Langasek wrote:
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.
If Eric's statement that the firefox logos are distributed under a non-free
copyright license remains accurate, then it seems that ultimately, the only
acceptable solution to Debian would unfortunately be to stop using the
firefox name altogether. So I'm hoping we can find a middle ground
somewhere.
Are the Debian logos and trademarks free? From what I've been able to
find via Google, it doesn't seem like they are. Is there some sort of
convenient rebranding switch that creators of derivative distributions
can use? One possible solution is to comply with our requirements for
your own distro, but link the official branding switch to the Debian
switch. Maybe I'm assuming too much in hoping for such a
straightforward solution?
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...
These are corner cases, but they are nevertheless important to Debian, as
we're committed to providing our users an operating system consisting
entirely of material that they have the right to modify, reuse, and
redistribute (trademarks not withstanding). Of course, we've had problems
living up to this even where our own trademarks are concerned, so Debian as
a whole is likely to be forgiving of logo licensing problems in the near
term, but the package maintainers don't *have* to avail themselves of such
leniency, and it's my understanding that Eric has already decided it's in
Debian's best interest to not ship the logos under a non-free copyright
license.
Understood, but it is important to consider legal implications when
mucking around with trademarks. At the least, file a bug in our
bugzilla (Marketing -> Trademark Permissions) if you want to try to get
an exception to how things are typically done. That said, when I asked
cbeard (who's in charge of product/branding issues), he explicitly said
no to this case.
If Eric wants to take a hard line on this, that's his prerogative as a
Debian maintainer. We are trying to establish a fairly consistent user
experience and visual identity, and consistent use of our logos is a key
element there. Given that Debian does the same thing in defending and
assuring the quality of its mark, I'm frankly not sure that there's much
of a justification to be found for making a special exemption
(especially with the concern that its a slippery slope, i.e. if Debian
can, why can't CentOS use a different icon set too?) We'd still need to
review all of the proposed changes before we could even consider going
beyond the standard trademark setup.
Is the sticking point in all of this truly that the Mozilla Foundation finds
it unacceptable to ship a browser named firefox which uses the
non-trademarked logos, or is it that we've broken the configure option that
others are expected to use when getting the un-branded version? I.e., would
it be suitable if Debian updated its patch to add a separate "name but no
logos" configure option, leaving the original "no name, no logos" option
intact?
Really, its both. Not being able to build without the official branding
means that anyone creating a derivative from Debian's source packages
will end up with our name. But beyond that, we want both used together
in all cases. As a note, we use the unofficial branding icons/images
and a codename for nightly and alpha builds, as an indicator of relative
testing/stability/quality. Using those logos with final releases
breaks that convention pretty badly, and muddles the "mark of quality"
issue quite a bit.
Ultimately, it comes back to trademark signoffs. The process stalled
somewhat when the person doing the trademark reviews switched jobs, so
your turn never came, but I'm hoping to get some form of a process in
place for getting individual changes signed off by the right people on
our end. In skimming the ubuntu version of the Debian patchset, I'm not
sure I'm comfortable with some of the changes shipping with official
branding, but this isn't the right place to discuss that.
(I'm also confused about what age of files are being patched, i.e. one
of the last file change is to add a height to the GNOME prefwindow,
which was landed two months before the 1.5 release, yet the "original"
is still showing a width only. This makes me worry about how accurate
the diff is at this point. Does there exist a formal set of patches
that can be applied to a current tarball, like Fedora has? i.e.
http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/rpms/firefox/FC-5/ If not, that is
also a significant concern, since its hard to tell what all of the
changes are for in such a large set of changes.)
Assuming we work something out, I can email the appropriate people
(Eric, others?) once we have the right process in place to get those
signoffs done (as I imagine there's going to be another review of all
distros for Fx2 as everyone starts moving over).
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