[Possibly OT] Trademarks

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 15:50:12 -0500, Christopher Aillon
<caillon at redhat.com> wrote:
> I have already replied to this issue (on this list) and noted that we
> have an agreement with the Mozilla Foundation.  Additionally, I have
> requested permission from the Mozilla Foundation on potential problem
> areas before patching them into our distribution as of recently.  I have
> not received word of any issue that the Mozilla Foundation has with our
> officially released packages.

My one question is  how is the mozilla situation different from the
pine situation in practise.
I realize the licensing isn't the same, but my understanding is the
pine license allowed for patched versions to be distributed if the
name was changed to indicate that the distributed copy was not the
same as upstream.

What happens if you want to put in a patch into fedora that upstream
mozilla does not agree with?  If you have to continue to get upstream
approval before every patch is applied, don't you run the risk of
disagreement which will necesitate renaming and replacing the icons?
Isn't this a potential maintence issue for Core?  Disagreements do
happen.  I have no problem with mozilla protecting its marks. But I
would prefer fedora to package mozilla using the iceweazel option and
not use mozilla's marks at all to forestall any abrupt branding change
required over disagreeable patches.

> Also please note that in order to even get the "Firefox" name and
> artwork built in if you are rolling your own build, you have to
> knowingly turn it on with a few environment variables and configure flags.

Are you talking about the upstream source or the fedora srpm here?

-jef