severity 829701 minor thanks On Wed, Jul 06, 2016 at 12:21:36PM +0200, Thorsten Glaser wrote: > > Are there any other discussions about this where others agree with your > > interpretation about this? #760306 is still waiting for a comment from > > the ftp masters. > > Barring a comment from ftpmasters you should err on the safe side.
So in the case of doubt and without any comment from ftp-masters, one should ignore the opinion of their upstream, which includes the opinions of a fully-staffed trained legal team of a free-software minded organization such as the Wikimedia Foundation -- or, for that matter, the intentions of the trademark holder which in this case is also a free-culture minded organization (Creative Commons)? I wholeheartedly disagree with that statement. Don't get me wrong -- I think it's good to raise those questions and clarify licenses and challengfe the status quo, but I think it would demonstrate arrogance to start stripping files like that or claim that the CC logos are unfree. > Let me quote: > You are authorized to use our trademarks subject to this Trademark Policy, > and only on the further > condition that you download images of the trademarks directly from our > [35]website. You are not > > Your packaging of Mediawiki does not do that. Users of your packaging > do not do that. That alone is grounds for unfreeness. Well, first of all, "freeness" and "free software" are terms that apply to copyright law and licenses, as is the DFSG for that matter. There is no such thing as a "free" or "non-free" trademark license — neither Debian nor the FL/OSS community at large have made any such definitions. You /could/ argue that because of a trademark policy (e.g. that clause above), Debian does not have the right to distribute the work and thus violates trademark law by doing so. That would apply to other entities distributing those particular logos, such as, I dunno, everyone on the Internet, including Debian via a bunch of other packages in the archive ;) My understanding is that such an interperation of the license combined with this widespread use would weakens the trademark to the point where it could get unenforceable (trademark law is very different than copyright law). I don't interpret that clause like you do, but I'd be happy regardless to raise this with Wikimedia's legal team. (I am a Wikimedia Foundation staff member, although my comments here are not on behalf of the Foundation and are done on my personal capacity as a Debian Developer and interested user). On the other bug report you mentioned that you were in contact with someone from the Foundation's legal team. Could you perhaps let us know who you were previously in contact with so that we can continue that conversation rather than start it from the beginning? Thanks, Faidon
