Hi, For those of you who're not aware: the Mozilla Foundation is now forcing people who want to use their firefox trademark to display an EULA to their users on first run of the software. It does not currently require them to accept to it, so they can easily bypass the license by just ignoring it.
Obviously this doesn't have any effect on us; we don't use the Mozilla trademark, and unless they choose to drop the GPL or MPL or any of their other licenses as a license choice, we can just ignore this EULA, but that doesn't make this thing any less obnoxious. I find the kind of practices that the Mozilla Foundation is going through rather disturbing. Free Software is about giving people the ability to modify software and share these modifications; and though Mozilla isn't currently doing that, they /are/ impeding the freedom to modify software for those users who want to use their trademark. There are two reasons I'm proposing this vote, even though it doesn't directly affect us: - I've always considered Debian to be a leading member of the Free Software community; as such, I feel it is our duty to tell others when we think they are straying off the path of Free Software. - Perhaps more importantly, if the Free Software community as a whole accepts this kind of behaviour from large Free Software projects, it is not unimaginable that other projects will follow suit. This kind of thing /would/ directly affect us, since I'd hate to have to remember a Debian-World mappings of software names including things like Iceweasel-Firefox, Giant-Gnome, Degeneration-Evolution, and Kitten-Mutt. If you get my point. Now, I'd also like to mention that I'm not opposed to trademarks as a whole; as the case around the Linux trademark has shown, there will always be cases where having a trademark is necessary. Additionally, the argument which the Mozilla people have been using in defense of their trademark policy back when we changed our branding of Firefox to Iceweasel, that the Bad Boys might ship a version of Firefox which includes trojans that they want to be able to fight through trademarks; and that in order to make such a fight possible, they have to defend their trademark now, might be somewhat sensible. However, when they start using their trademark to enforce certain requirements that we would consider non-free if it were in a copyright license, I think they're going one bridge too far. As such, I'm proposing the following position statement as under section 4.1.5 of the constitution: ===Begin resolution text=== The Debian Project has been watching the case around the Mozilla Project's EULA requirement for people wishing to use their trademarks from a distance. This is an issue that has been brewing for a few years now; and even though we've chosen not to use the Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla, and Seamonkey trademarks, we still feel that we ought to make our position on this important issue clear. The Free Software community as a whole is based around the notion that one should be allowed to modify software when they feel it necessary; and that the right to such modification and subsequent redistribution is a basic right to users that should not be taken away. By using trademark law to enforce certain requirements that we do not usually consider to be characteristic of Free Software, such as a requirement for patch review and a requirement to include a particular end-user license, the Debian Project feels that the Mozilla Foundation has now turned the trademarked version of their Free Software into software that is no longer free. ===End resolution text=== We've actually already said this by uploading forked versions of Mozilla software; but given my above rationale, I think it's only proper to make this more official through this resolution. I'm looking for seconds. -- <Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes. -- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22
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