Royalty free gstreamer plug-in

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Fri Dec 23 16:45:37 UTC 2005


On 12/23/05, Patrick Barnes <nman64 at n-man.com> wrote:
> Fedora is the same way.  You can't modify it and continue to call it
> Fedora.  However, you can redistribute it and rebuild it in pristine
> form and continue to call it Fedora.  The same is true of Mozilla.

I do not think its true that a pristine build of the src.rpm as
shipped for mozilla by fedora is allowed according to Mozilla's
trademark policy. I have looked at this.. alot.

The Mozilla trademark policy says that you can not use the trademarked
mozilla icons in your rebuild of the mozilla sources unless you get
permission to do so. Even if you think its a verbatim rebuild of a
licensed binary.

The upstream mozilla sources are constructed in a way that default
rebuilds do not incorporate the mozilla trademarks. To get the mozilla
trademark icons into the build process you need to use some optional
arguments to the configure script to enabled them.
This is done explicitly to avoid people accidently running afoul of
the trademark policy. To use the mozilla trademarks in your downstream
build you must get permission from Mozilla... no if ands or buts. 
This doesn't transfer to verbatim rebuilds. There is absolutely no
languge in Mozilla's trademark policy that says trademark license to
use the mozilla marks transfer to a 3rd vendor with verbatim rebuilds
from an existing licensed binary from a 2nd vendor.  Each new vendor
who is rebuilding mozilla source must obtain a license to use the
mozilla marks regardless of where they obtained the source they are
rebuilding from.

Fedora has permission to use the trademarks in its builds and the
Fedora src.rpms enable the use of the trademark icons. I have seen
absolutely no language anywhere that tranfers this permission to use
the mozilla marks to anyone doing unmodified rebuilds of Fedora
mozilla packages. Anyone rebuilding with src.rpms from Fedora and
attempts to redistribute them also end up using the trademarked icons
unless they delibrately turn them off... even though they do not have
permission from mozilla to use those icons.
This situation breaks the "pure rebuild" policy. Anyone rebuilding
mozilla packages from fedora sources, even if unmodified.. must get
permission from mozilla to use the trademarks.

I'm more than welcome to be contradicted by the mozilla package
maintainer or someone else on the release team who has looked over the
mozilla trademark policy issues.

-jef




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