On Tue, 2005-04-05 at 13:40 +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
and a couple of accusations that debian is being persecuted while groups like Fedora are allowed to infringe, among other things. Read the threads on http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/ for a balanced view.
Where on the debian-legal is an accusation that debian are being persecuted? Are they - in your opinion - being persecuted?
That seems far more serious than the current "problems" with trademarks.
Also as I understand it, the command names and some package names may remain unchanged because they are functional parts, as long as the description makes it clear that it's not the Mozilla build.
I don't know about trademarks, but that's not the case with trade marks. Functionality is irrelevant.
I read the discussion on debian-legal and I'm not sure that a) people understand the complexity of the law, or b) the complexity of Mozilla's specific position. Moz are on a somewhat sticky wicket in this country anyway - as I understand it, they are only able to use the term 'firefox' under licence - and that may also be true elsewhere. They cannot drop the name either, if we're being sensible.
It's possibly a bit unfair to lay the blame for the trade mark issue at Mozilla's door, I feel. If they were having trouble with patents, we would commiserate, and ask that people help them code around the issue. Currently, the Mozilla project has many many hackers less than it needs and it doesn't surprise me that bugs like this (which are really a specific sub-class of more general bugs that distributors encounter) take a while to be fixed.
Going back to the Talkback problem, we should be encouraging Mozilla to fix the problem and help them do it. I know RMS called for a forked packaging effort - I think all parties would be better served if free binaries were available from Mozilla.
Cheers,
Alex.