Firefox Faces Trademark Issues

daria42 writes "The Debian development community is currently hotly debating whether the Mozilla Foundation's strict trademarks policy violates Debian's social contract. However, in a twist, it appears Mozilla has not received approval for the Firefox trademarks yet, and the Firefox name may already be taken in the UK and Germany. The foundation has not applied for the Thunderbird trademark anywhere yet."

Comments

I really dislike these source-less zdnet articles

[Anonymous Coward]

So I'm interested in reading the actual discussions on the debian mailinglists - because I have this strange quirk where I actually find them interesting.
So, google site:lists.debian.org firefox trademark - nothing since february, all of which has long since been resolved. So much for "recently criticised".

Could we please just stop linking to zdnet/cnet/... articles here on /. ? They're worse than useless.

What about the GFDL?

[jesterzog]

A few weeks ago, I installed the autoconf package on my Debian system, only to discover that there was no documentation included in the standard /usr/share/doc/autoconf/ location. After checking, I discovered that it'd be recently removed, because Debian considers the GNU Free Documentation Licence -- the main documentation licence promoted by the FSF -- as a non-free licence. (Debian has concerns about how it'd work in DRM environments. The Free Software Foundation doesn't agree.)

Luckily in that case, there's now an autoconf-doc package in the non-free section of Debian, and I installed that. What confuses me, though, is how Debian expects to cope in the future if it doesn't accept something as the GFDL, which is widely accepted as the Free Software Foundation's GPL-for-documentation, and used in a lot of places related to open source. All of the KDE help files, for instance, are distributed under the GFDL. Debian hasn't cut them yet, but does this mean that it won't be including them as soon as someone realises?

I really like Debian and I have no plans to stop using it unless it stops being possible to do what I want. I'm impressed by the project's dedication to being so specific about licences, but sometimes I wonder how much of that will eventually come back to haunt it.

Re:What about the GFDL?

[Phexro]

Debian is definitely pedantic about licenses, but I think that's better than having license issues come back to haunt them in the form of a lawsuit.

Re:What about the GFDL?

[Brandybuck]

In Debian's favor, the GFDL really is a crap piece of licensing. It allows you to keep parts of the document proprietary, an act that would have RMS suffering from conniption fits if it were done with software. Unfortunately, the FSF has done a good job of proselytizing the license, so that most people use it out of a knee jerk reaction, instead of actually examing the license for suitability.

Against Debian, however, is their anal approach to licenses. They are not about freedom, they are a support group for the terminally legalistic and argumentative.

Leonard Of Quirm

[SpooForBrains]