Slashdot Mirror
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."
Good thing I installed that plugin, almost makes the browser change name less often.
Sigs are bad for your health
Why do I have the sinking feeling that we're all going to be sitting here in ten years time, reading about the Godzilla Foundation dispute over ScorchedBadger and LightningParakeet?
*blinking cursor*
... a Leonardo Da Quirm replacement name:- web-browser.
Super-fast-and-cross-platform-and-expandable-free
I think that just rolls off the tongue, don't you?
multifariam.net -- yet another nerd blog
Although I completely agree with the parent that ZDNet articles are worse than useless, there has been recent discussion on the debian mailinglist. Don't know why it's not in google yet (too recent), but the thread on debian-devel starts here.
In other news...
The Debian development community is currently hotly debating whether the Debian Project's strict trademarks policy violates Debian's social contract.
Oh, boy! I can't wait to see how this one turns out!
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
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.
My suggestions:
"{1e8ba19e-48eb-4a68-bec4-d81c010069e4} (tm) Web Browser" and
"{33899fb5-719b-4e75-a0ef-e7f91b196030} (tm) Mail Client"
The odds that these name have been previously trademarked are rather slim.
Fireduckbilledplatypus anyone?
I think, therefore I am. I think?