trademarks [was: xulrunner 2.0 in rawhide (F15) bundles several system libs]

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Oct 06, 2010 at 10:59:08 -0400,
  Nathaniel McCallum <nathaniel at natemccallum.com> wrote:
> 
> I have an idea... I'm going to create a fork of Fedora.  I'm going to
> fill it full of proprietary shit.  I'm going to find the buggiest closed
> drivers I can find and load them into the kernel.  I'll also make it so
> that you have to type in your credit card number just to login.  I'll
> register a fedora derivative domain name and SEO the hell out of it.
> Then, I'll tell people my distro is called Fedora Ultimate Edition.
> Everyone will believe me because I'll leave all the Fedora artwork in
> place.  I'll also publish is under the pseudonym of Ralf Corsepius: Ralf
> Corsepius' Fedora Ultimate Edition.

The Fedora project goes pretty far in making it easy to produce an unbranded
version of Fedora for people that want to do that. The trademark protected
stuff is supposed to be in just a few packages that have alternative packages
in the distro already, that can replace them. I think that makes a point
that Fedora isn't trying to abuse trademarks to keep supposedly open source
closed.

I don't think Mozilla is trying to abuse their trademarks either (though
there have been open source projects that have). I don't think they go as
far as fedora in making it easy to make a rebranded application, but they
certainly don't make it very difficult either as there is an Iceweasel
out there.

The issue seems to be that Mozilla's policies for their brand conflict
with Fedora's policies for their brand and that Fedora has limited
resources. I don't think anyone is being evil here. There are reasonable
positions on both sides of the argument.