On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 09:47:27AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote: [...] > I would like to know your position or vision on our trademarks and logos, and, > if you indend to work on that question as a DPL, what would be the key points > of your action.
Stefano has already given an overview of the current state of things. It's interesting that some work has been done in this area, and if elected, I do intend to see this through. From Stefano's mail, it looks like there's a good chance that we'll be able to change our trademark policy to be less restrictive, which can only be a good thing. As to my personal preference on the matter: On the one hand, I think that whatever trademark policy we have or end up with should be consistent with what we require from upstreams. For instance, we currently do not ship mozilla products under their original name, because we find their trademark policy too restrictive. We should make sure that our own trademark policy would not be rejected by a hypothetical downstream distribution with trademark policies similar to our own. For the record, I'm not sure whether or not our current trademark policy passes or fails that test. On the other hand, I think it's important to remember that trademark law and copyright law are two very different matters. The right to modify software so it fits your own goal is core to what free software is about; but the right to misrepresent others is not. A trademark policy that is too liberal could allow people to take a piece of software, make it do something extremely evil (like, say, install a password logger by default that sends all passwords to some evil overlords on the far side of the moon) and say "This is an unmodified Debian installation disk". While I don't expect this to happen every other day, fighting this kind of thing is exactly why trademark law was invented. If we lose our trademark, then anyone can call anything "Debian" and we wouldn't be able to tell them to stop. So while I agree that perhaps a somewhat less restrictive trademark policy may be in order, we should make sure we do not make our trademark policy so liberal that we may lose control over it; and if that means we have to make it more difficult for people to do some things in ways we would rather not require of them, then I think doing that is the lesser of the two evils. -- The volume of a pizza of thickness a and radius z can be described by the following formula: pi zz a
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