On 8/20/2015 8:03 PM, Benson Margulies wrote: > If a distro takes a release of Apache X, and make significant changes to > it, and then distributes it, I believe that it's not OK with us for them to > simply call it Apache X. I've seen some evidence that Gentoo Linux makes a > regular habit of this, because their policies drive them to make some > pretty scary changes in some cases. Others may not share my view.
This is how Debian ended up with "iceweasel" instead of "firefox." Mozilla was not OK with allowing its trademarks to be used for the version of those products that Debian was including. Mozilla went 800-pound gorilla on Debian. Debian complied, but took the rebranding route rather than allow Mozilla to force them to compromise on their internal guidelines. They got a small measure of revenge with the package names they chose. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded_by_the_Debian_project Here's a similar situation applicable to Apache ... the Debian and Ubuntu projects include a very old version of Apache Solr. The code gets patched quite a bit, and a few of the changes could probably be called intrusive, but it doesn't fundamentally change what the user gets. When the packages are installed (they split the Solr/Lucene code into *many* binary packages), the file locations are *dramatically* altered compared to a binary or source download from the Solr website. Given what those projects do to our code and packaging, do we have any right to tell them they can't call their package "Solr"? If we do have that right, are we losing anything by not exercising it? Their changes do mean that when people come to the solr-user mailing list looking for help, we sometimes have to refer them to the downstream maintainers, because we can't make any sense of where things are. Even though it sometimes creates support issues, I personally don't think there's any big problem with the way that Debian/Ubuntu changes our software, but what would a lawyer say? Thanks, Shawn
