Eric Dorland wrote:
Please see Gerv's comments here:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/01/msg00757.html to see
where he agreed we did not have to use the logo.
Fair enough, he did make that statement. At the time, we obviously
weren't taking that part seriously. We are now, and we're saying its
not ok.
He also stated that the logos were not in the tarball, which may have
been true at the time, but is certainly no longer true. (see
mozilla/other-licenses in the 1.5.0.7 tarball)
In that light, you should consider this, as I previously said, notice
that your usage of the trademark is not permitted in this way, and we
are expecting a resolution. If your choice is to cease usage of the
trademark rather than bend the DFSG a little, that is your decision
to make.
Is there no way that you could be convinced to split the license on
the logo to have a DSFG-free copyright license and the same,
restrictive trademark license. That would basically clear up the issue
from our perspective and IMHO not weaken your ability to enforce your
trademarks.
At this point, its highly unlikely.that we would allow any changes to
the license that would be compliant with the DFSG, certainly not
creation of derived works. The logo is a powerful brand and mark on its
own, and it would be fairly silly to give up the control of that mark in
such a way.
If this isn't possible, could we at least get a stay of execution?
Etch is going into deep freeze in less than a month. Would it be
possible to resolve this after the release?
I would think it makes much more sense to resolve this before you put
another long-lived release into the wild, unless your aim is to delay
compliance. Ignoring the logo issue entirely, I have grave concerns
around the nature and quality of some of the changes the patchset
contains, and I would like to see the changes as a set of specific
patches before I could make any recommendation as to whether we should
continue to allow use of the trademark. If we were forced to revoke
your permission to use the trademark, freeze state would not matter, you
would be required to change all affected packages as soon as possible.
Its not a nice thing to do, but we would do it if necessary, and we have
done so before.
If you do have this set of patches (a question which you didn't bother
to answer) a link would be greatly appreciated so I can get them into
our bugzilla and get the right sets of eyes on the code. Regardless of
whether we're going to circle around on the logo issue, if you intend to
continue using the mark, you need to do that ASAP.
Because Gerv is not responsible anymore for the trademark permissions
and approvals, that means any agreements reached with him are null and
void?
Not necessarily, just saying I don't see a need to consult him,
especially if something he thought was ok (splitting logos from
wordmark) has been confirmed to not be.
So this means any patch we wish to apply to the source must be signed
off by Mozilla corporation before we can upload packages? What if this
is a security update, do we need to wait for you before we can update
the package?
Yes, if you are shipping a browser called Firefox, we should be signing
off on every deviation from what we ship. Yes, its time consuming, and
yes, I can find more entertaining ways to spend my time, but its a
necessary evil.
As for your straw man about security bugs, what security bugs would you
be fixing with your own patches? If there are security bugs, they
should be fixed upstream, not in your own tree. We've had this
discussion repeatedly in the context of the security group, and we
expect that branded builds of x.y.z from <insert distro here> will be
the source tarball/cvs tag for x.y.z plus the set of approved patches.
We do not want to get into the fools' game of cherry-picking patches, or
individual distros deciding that Patch A isn't "security-oriented" enough.
This is all something we draw a hard line on, even for distros that have
people contributing back to the project. There are no free passes, nor
should there be. I have actually been asked recently by another distro
maintainer whether everyone is on a fair playing field. Right now, it
seems to others as if Debian has a special deal, which isn't fair, and
it needs to change.
To be honest, the more I read about the DFSG, I don't know if its
possible to use our trademarks at all, as someone making a major change
would not inherit the grant, and would be in violation of our trademark
requirements, thus it isn't in the spirit of the DFSG. I know this is
well-trodden ground, but now that we have a process, I'm not sure you
want to go down that path. On the other hand, if by simply changing a
build option, users can make unlimited changes, I think that's much
saner than "if you make major changes, you need to change anywhere it
says Firefox." The current setup is even more restrictive than just
using the switch, because the exact same restrictions on building a
derivative version apply whether or not you use the switch, but its
harder to be sure you've completely fixed the branding. Debian users
cannot freely create derivative versions of the app with or without the
switch, so breaking the switch isn't especially helpful.
Following up with another comment to sum up.
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