Firefox trademark shenanigans (Re: Any chance of getting Firefox 2.0 into rawhide/FC6?)

[Rahul Sundaram]

Eric Dorland wrote:
> 
> Copyrights and trademarks are different things.

Yes. They are but in this case they are closely interlinked.

  The problem with the
> Firefox logo is that it has a non-DFSG-free copyright license, not
> necessarily the trademark license. No one has explained to me
> adequately why you can't have a free copyright license but a more
> restrictive trademark one.

This is a thorny issue we have been discussing for a while in Fedora 
too.  See 
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2006-August/msg00040.html. 
There doesnt seem to be any easy answers around this. Putting the logo 
under a Free software license would mean other people can create 
derivatives of Fedora, add whatever junk they want and use the Fedora 
logo in that derivative distribution. We want to avoid that. They are 
free to do derivatives of course but we dont want them to use the Fedora 
trademark name and brand.

> 
> The Debian branding being non-free is considered a bug and proposals
> are being put forward to fix it, and make us stop looking slightly
> hypocritical.

I wonder how Debian is planning to avoid the above problem.

Rahul