Steve Langasek wrote:
Are the Debian logos and trademarks free?
No, the Debian logos are not free. This is considered a bug.
Since there's no way of making the logo free without losing control over
the mark, why not adopt a generic branding switch like we did? Its
non-trivial to do, but it makes creating derivatives much easier. Its
pretty trivial, as you might discover, to rebrand the entire browser,
now that we've done that work, and really, any good fork/derivative
becomes a new app anyway, so this is a great thing to do. This gives
users absolute freedom to create new distros with their own
naming/artwork/etc, which isn't just freedom in theory, its lowering the
bar to exercising that freedom.
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.
Given your subsequent comments indicating that the Mozilla Foundation
reserves the right to revoke trademark grants for released versions of
Debian, I don't see that we have any choice but to discontinue our use of
the marks.
This is getting into theoretical games, of course, but if a released
version was found to be below an acceptable standard, we would be
required to take action to defend the mark, or risk losing our ability
to defend it. We are not going to give Debian carte blanche and deny
ourselves a possible recourse if something goes sour. That would only
make sense if there was little value in defending the mark.
For my part I think your trademark handling is unprecedented in Free
Software and really rather unreasonable, and it's certainly far removed from
the understanding that we had with Gervase previously, but it's your
trademark to manage as you wish and Debian will certainly take appropriate
steps to ensure we aren't infringing it
I think that's a bold and inaccurate statement. Red Hat is a prime
example of an open source company that aggressively protects its
trademarks. I certainly can't modify a Debian ISO image and distribute
that as Debian (nor should I be able to, lest the distro landscape
become even more confusing). The vast majority of apps don't have
trademarks at all, but those that do either defend and manage them, or
lose them.
I haven't made it through all of the endless mailing list flamewars from
when Gerv was tracking trademark issues, but ultimately it comes back to
treating everyone fairly, which hasn't been consistently true. That
means changes get vetted, branding usage is consistent, and we minimize
the difference between distributions (not just Linux, but examples like
the package Google distributes with their toolbar).
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