I was asked to provide some information on the trademark issue with "Trusted Debian" (the project now known as Adamantix). I first heard of the "Trusted Debian" project when they released version 1.0 and subsequently received some press coverage. Reading the user comments on the Slashdot posting in which the project had been mentioned, I noticed that there was some confusion whether the "Trusted Debian" project is a Debian project. Furthermore, some people approached me directly and pointed out that they didn't feel comfortable with the name, for various reasons. The most prominent was that the title "Trusted Debian" implied that the project was endorsed by Debian. However, since it is not in fact a Debian (sub-)project, we cannot ensure that our standards of quality are upheld. I feared that people might assume that "Trusted Debian" is a product by Debian and this fear was confirmed when heise.de wrote that the Debian project released a trusted version of Debian. Another oft-cited reason was that the name "Trusted Debian" might suggest that the stock Debian is not trusted or secure.
In my role as DPL, I contacted Peter Busser, the founder of "Trusted Debian". I expressed my concerns, and asked if he would be interested in either joining the Debian project and having his effort as an official Debian subproject, or in changing the name to something other than "Trusted Debian". Peter responded and said he would change the name. I've bounced my original mail and Peter's two responses (I received the second response before I had a chance to answer the first one) to debian-email so Debian developers can read the messages themselves (master.debian.org:~debian/archive/debian-email/debian-email-200309). It is needless to say that my mails were polite and that I never threatened with legal action. In fact, I told Peter they can use the trustedebian.org domain for a while to redirect traffic to their new home. This incidence has shown two things. First, many people are not aware that Debian is a trademark. I have therefore asked the webmasters to add a trademark statement to the footer of our web site and this was done on 2003-07-19. Second, our trademark policy is not clear at all. The only written policy can be found in an announcement by Bruce Perens in http://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/debian-announce-1998/msg00006.html which states that, To be fair to all businesses, we insist that no business use the name "Debian" in the name of the business, or a domain name of the business. Since this policy is not very clear, a Trademark Committee was created to refine this policy and create a proper trademark policy. I will post more about this soon. -- Martin Michlmayr [EMAIL PROTECTED]
