On 6/19/05, Eric Dorland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > * Michael K. Edwards ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > > I wouldn't say "accept" it, I would say "acknowledge" the safety zone > > offered unilaterally by the Mozilla Foundation, and as a courtesy to > > them make some effort to stay comfortably within it while continuing > > to ship under the Mozilla names. Their trademark policy is surely > > less draconian than, say, Red Hat's, and we aren't going around > > purging the RedHat Package Manager from Debian. > > I think you're playing word games now. Even if this is a unilateral > "gift" we still need to decide if we want it or not.
Of course; and as the maintainer, you are going to be the one making that call. I'm just chary of using words like "offer" and "accept" because they suggest that we are in the contract zone. I think (I could be wrong; IANAL) that, in the free software arena, it's actually better for both sides for the trademark holder to say: "We aren't exactly licensing all and sundry to manufacture products under our brand. Our product line includes both the source code and the 'official' binaries; we are of the opinion that third parties who follow these guidelines when building and distributing their own binaries are merely re-packaging our source code product (under standards like Coty v. Prestonettes in the US and X, Y, and Z elsewhere) and using our trademarks descriptively. "We reserve the right to decide unilaterally that someone either has created a product of their own (to which our trademark can't be applied without license) or isn't doing an adequate job of QA in the course of re-packaging. But if and when that happens, we're going to follow the steps outlined here to try to bring them into voluntary compliance before we demand that they either accept a formal license and traditional oversight procedures or cease to apply our trademarks to their modified version of our product." >From what I've read, that's as open a policy as a trademark holder can offer and still retain control of the trademark in the long run. I may be overstating here how far the Mozilla Foundation is willing to go; but if a modus vivendi can be reached in which the only thing special about Debian is that the guidelines more or less reflect the maintainer's actual practice, I think that sits more comfortably with DFSG #8 than a license per se. > > If the offer from six months ago still stands (which, to my > > recollection and in my non-lawyer view, read like a unilateral "safety > > zone" rather than a trademark license as such), that's extraordinarily > > accommodating on MoFo's part. It's a square deal from people with a > > pretty good reputation for square deals. They deserve better from > > Debian than to have their flagship products obscured by a rename when > > they haven't done anything nasty to anyone yet. > > What reputation are you referring to? Not that I necessarily disagree, > but what are you basing that assessment on? Their rebranding isn't special for Netscape/AOL and other corporate partners; they've worked very hard to make it accessible to third parties without any need for explicit cooperation with them. They're going through the agony of relicensing their entire code base under MPL/LGPL/GPL so that GPL projects can cherry-pick at source code level. They're good citizens in W3C standards space even when the committee decisions go against them (e. g., XUL vs. XForms). I don't know the details of their CA certificate handling, but at least they _have_ a policy and respond constructively to criticism of it. And Mitch Kapor and the rest of the MoFo board have a lot of street cred as individuals. > > The FSF has, at best, completely failed to offer leadership with > > respect to free software and trademarks, as the MySQL case and the Red > > Hat / UnixCD mess have shown. I think it would be rather gratifying > > if Debian could step in to fill the void. And it would be kind of > > nice to have a workable modus vivendi to exhibit if and when the Linux > > Mark Institute (or the OpenSSL team or the PHP folks or Red Hat or > > MySQL) comes knocking. > > I do have to agree that guidance when it comes to trademark situations > is sorely lacking. There doesn't seem to be that consistent a > viewpoint with Debian either unfortunately. It's a sticky wicket. Free software enthusiasts (among whom I count myself) don't like systems that exacerbate second-class-citizenship among those whose motivations aren't principally commercial. Nowadays everyone's a publisher, and the paperwork overhead of copyright has dropped near to zero (until you try to enforce it); but not everyone is a marketer, and that's what trademarks are about. I think it's possible to have a personal-freedom-compatible trademark policy, but it's not trivial, and the first few tries are bound to have their discontents. Doesn't mean it's not worth trying, though. Cheers, - Michael (IANADD, IANAL)
