On 22/07/13 09:57, Brian May wrote: >> The issue in the Debian branding of Firefox and Thunderbird was not >> fundamentally the trademark. It was the use of a non-DFSG licence on the >> logo, which Debian could not use. > > The following email says it had nothing to do with the logo, and says it is > was trademark issue. >
My understanding is, from reading the list discussions (please correct me where I am wrong, you've been around this community a lot longer than me): http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/01/msg00757.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg02145.html http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=354622 Around mid 2005, the Debian maintainer Eric Dorland raised concerns about the use of the Mozilla trademark. This was because although Debian would be able to use the trademark, users would not have those same privileges, which he felt was not acceptable under the DFSG. After some discussion, it appears that Eric made the decision to ignore the issue. In 2006, Mozilla started to take things more seriously. Mike Connor reported a severe bug regarding the use of Firefox as an application name without official branding. Initially the "key problem" was that the unofficial build excluded the official logos. He thought it had been excluded because the artwork was part of the branding, but Eric Dorland said it was because it had a non-free copyright licence (and Gervase Markham of Mozilla had earlier indicated it was okay to leave the logo out). Mike Connor also clarified that they wished to explicitly handle approvals [which would make sense from a legal perspective, because lax maintenance of a trademark can lead to the trademark being lost]. On further pushing, Mike also communicated that Mozilla had issues with some of the patches [it isn't clear to me if that was initially part of the problem, or an escalation of the conflict; it wasn't raised earlier]. They were not prepared to even allow security patches to go through unvetted. A further complication was that this happened just before Etch going into freeze [which forced a quick resolution during a heated discussion]. I feel that there was a failure of communication at least as early as mid 2005 (including internally within Mozilla). I can't see how it was in Mozilla's interest to have an alternative branding with only minor patches in a significant distro, nor is it necessarily in Debian's interest to have to educate users about name changes in major packages. But by 2006, the Mozilla position had hardened to the point that no resolution was possible in the time frame allowed. However, even if the logo issue had been resolved, perhaps this was only a symptom of a deeper rift; as Ben Finney indicated, my use of the word 'fundamental' rather misses the mark. Even had the logo licence been remedied, the approvals process may have still caused problems. I also notice that both Mozilla and Debian now have split logo systems (ie, both open and restricted logos). The trademark issue itself was 'resolved' - unilaterally by Debian dropping the use of the trademark; they were not prevented from distributing the software. Perhaps that wasn't the best outcome, but I think it was justifiable. Glenn -- sks-keyservers.net 0x6d656d65 _______________________________________________ Free-software-melb mailing list [email protected] http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
