On Du, 19 feb 12, 19:56:11, Uoti Urpala wrote: > Stefano Zacchiroli <leader <at> debian.org> writes: > > - Debian should neither seek nor accept trademark licenses that are > > specific to the Debian Project. > > > > (Suggested by Steve Langasek. In addition to Steve's reasoning, I > > think that doing otherwise would go against the underlying principle > > of DFSG ยง8 "License Must Not Be Specific to Debian".) > > I think this one is questionable. Ideally, a trademark is about trust - it > tells > the user that the product meets the quality requirements of the trademark > owner. > A trademark owner may trust the processes used by the Debian project to > produce > results that meet their quality criteria, and may be able to monitor the > versions actually released by Debian and withdraw the right to use the > trademark > should Debian change in a direction that harms users. There's no way a > trademark > owner would trust random people or organizations they don't even know about, > nor > is it possible to maintain quality control over those. Thus, I think it would > make sense to have arrangements allowing Debian specifically to modify the > software in ways deemed necessary by the project without asking permission for > each individual change. Downstreams would have to either distribute the code > unchanged, seek a similar arrangement with the trademark owner, or rebrand.
This would be a major pain for derived distributions, as they would not be able to rely on Debian main to be redistributable (with changes) as is. Kind regards, Andrei -- Offtopic discussions among Debian users and developers: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/d-community-offtopic
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