[Possibly OT] Trademarks

[Christopher Aillon]

Paul Iadonisi wrote:
>   At the risk of stirring up a hornets' nest, I'd like to pose the
> question to Red Hatters: what approach are you taking to trademarks?
>   Apparently, there is (was?) some discussion going on at debian-legal
> regarding Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird.At first glance, I
> see that there are quite a few patches included in the firefox rpm in
> FC3 and even more in rawhide and I'm wondering if Red Hat has filtered
> this through its legal eagles, since it is still called Firefox.


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.


>   For the Mozilla case, based on some of the excerpts I've read, they're
> expectation is unreasonable: they want people to know they are using
> Firefox and Thunderbird (by name), but they want to control what types
> of changes are made to the software.  To me, that's end-run around the
> FOSS licenses which they have chosen.


Stop misrepresenting it.  You are allowed to change whatever you want 
without recourse.  What the Mozilla Foundation is protecting is the name 
"Firefox" and the respective art.  They want to make sure that if you 
are distributing "Firefox", you aren't selling an IE/NS4 clone.

For example, there have been occurences in the past with certain 
distributors patching gecko which negatively altered the standards 
compliance of the browser, after their patches had been rejected by 
upstream.  Note that it is completely valid for a distributor to do this 
per the Mozilla Public License, however, when bug reports and news items 
come back about certain versions of "Mozilla" being non-conformant to 
standards it claims to support, that's bad PR and hurts Mozilla and, 
indirectly open source.

Whether or not you agree with that, it does not dillute the fact that 
the source code is out there and under an open source license (it can be 
re-distributed as (L)GPL only if you wish) and you can make whatever 
changes to it that you wish.  If you are making substantive changes to 
it already, what's the big deal about a minor change to its name and 
artwork?  It's obviously not the same software, no need to pretend it 
is, though it should be attributed.  The fact that you are even allowed 
to see the source and modify and freely distribute such an integral 
piece of software on the desktop is just awesome, IMO.

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.