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

[Nathaniel McCallum]

On 10/06/2010 12:12 PM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> 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.

Agreed, I'm just trying to point out the absurdity of saying that "any
restriction on trademark impedes the freedoms of the GPL (etc...)."  My
point is that it is precisely the limitations that guarantee those freedoms.

I don't see any conflict between Fedora's policy and Mozilla's policy.
Both say that if you redistribute and change code you have to
re-trademark.  Those policies are fair and sensible.  We can either
patch and re-trademark Firefox or ship upstream.  One of the values of
Fedora is stay close to upstream.  Another value is the Firefox brand.
This is a no-brainer choice for Fedora: ship upstream Firefox.  I really
can't believe this thread is as long as it is.

The only possible room for debate that I see is that there is, in
Firefox, a potential conflict between our "ship upstream" and "don't
bundle libs" values.  We have FESco to sort that out.

In short: No big deal. Close the thread. Move on. ;)

Nathaniel