Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

Posted Jan 10, 2005 19:55 UTC (Mon) by piman (guest, #8957)
In reply to: Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks by josh_stern
Parent article: Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

> 1) use Mozilla like any other package but give it some name variant indicating it has been modified

That's what the article is about. Did you read it? This is what Debian (and everyone else) will have to do to distribute Mozilla under the current policy.

But this is substandard for users. What value does the "Mozilla" mark have for anyone -- distributors, users, or the Mozilla Foundation -- when every Unix user uses the Iceweasel browser instead? The Mozilla Foundation needs to realize their management of the mark is hurting everyone.

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Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

Posted Jan 10, 2005 20:08 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

Why it's Ok for *TeX (plain TeX, LaTeX and so on have very strict regulations imposed on redistributors)and bad for Firefox ?

Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

Posted Jan 11, 2005 4:22 UTC (Tue) by goonie (guest, #4252) [Link]

IIRC, TeX is treated as a special case by Debian developers, because it's been in Debian since day 1 (almost), and, well, it's by Don Knuth, sooper-genius.

Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

Posted Jan 13, 2005 17:49 UTC (Thu) by edgewood (subscriber, #1123) [Link] (1 responses)

While both the Iceweasel and Community Edition options are arguably DFSG-free, they both present policy challenges. Iceweasel is the best option from a freeness perspective, but poses challenges to Debian users, since many inexperienced users may be confused by the name changes. On the other hand, Debian developers may not want to live with the restrictions of the community edition.

TeX is different because 1) it has a much smaller user base than Mozilla, so a name change, if one were necessary, would have a smaller impact, and 2) a user who is experienced enough to even know what TeX is can probably handle a hypothetical name change.

Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

Posted Jan 20, 2005 13:33 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

Also, something tells me TeX won't need any security fixes.. ;-)

Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks

Posted Jan 10, 2005 20:18 UTC (Mon) by josh_stern (guest, #4868) [Link]

I read the article and felt that - without saying anything false - it gave a false impression of serious conflict where no serious conflict exists. My range of suggestions is meant to show that there are multiple good possibilities. You may feel like "1)" is not a good possibility, but I doubt most people seriously care. Also, if making a symlink doesn't count as "distribution" then sysadmins can make symlinks called mozilla for folks that can't cope with deb-mozilla or iceweasel.