[Ambassadors] Clarification Needed

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 02:51:28PM +0200, Mathieu Bridon (bochecha) wrote:
> > "Debian removes the Firefox branding because it is non-free. I therefore
> > conclude that Fedora doesn’t care about freedom."
> 
> The Firefox name and logos are registered trademarks. However, the
> Firefox code is free.

If you want a real lawyer's opinion on this, you'd need to ask one,
and I'm not one.  But Debian's position is based on Debian's
interpretation of trademarks and how they interact with free software.
In my view, including the Firefox name and logos is not a problem
because the code is still free to modify, as long as you remove the
trademarks when publishing a modified version.  One's right to modify
and redistribute is not hampered, but one must also respect the
trademark owner's rights as well.

> Fedora can't care about this name and logo issue as... Well, the
> Fedora name and logo are also registered trademarks, which means that
> it would be totally inconsistent to enforce freedom trademark for some
> software but not for us.

Yes, it would be inconsistent.

> Fedora is free regarding the code. Debian is somehow « freeer » as
> they also consider trademark freedom.

It's not that they consider trademark freedom, but rather that they
interpret the requirement to remove trademarks as an encroachment on
the freedom of the source code.  I don't believe that's an accurate
reading of trademark law or freedom; it's one of the few areas where
we probably differ from Debian, since we see eye to eye with them on
many issues.

> However, if you are concerned about this particular issue, you can
> replace the « fedora-logos » package by the « generic-logos » one.
> This package is the only one in Fedora that carries the Fedora
> trademarked logo, and you can easily replace it.

Remember that the "Fedora" name is a trademark too; by replacing
fedora-release and fedora-release-notes with the generic-* equivalents
you are completing the task.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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