Definition of Open Source [was Re: pine: UW permission to distribute]

[Leonard den Ottolander]

On Wed, 2004-07-21 at 00:29, Warren Togami wrote:

> Jos Vos wrote:
> > And also a special permission for fedora.us, i.s.o. a general permission,
> > does violate the general Open Source definition AFAIK.

> fedora.us Extras received special permission from the upstream Firefox 
> team that allows us to use the "official binary only Firefox trademark 
> icon" in our firefox package.  As long as fedora.us Extras distributes 
> the binary of firefox, we may use that icon, but anybody rebuilding and 
> redistributing the package technically should toggle a switch that 
> disables that trademarked icon.

Now you tell us. Is this in COPYING? Such deals should be made explicit
to the user to avoid inadvertent violations.

> I don't know much about legal stuff, but I suspect this is similar to 
> the situation of Red Hat's trademarks in RHEL.

The above is, but the open source issue is not.

> If this does "violate the general Open Source definition", I do not know 
> nor do I care.

Trademark issues are quite different from copyright issues. You should
not try to compare them if you "don't know much about legal stuff" ;) .

Leonard.

-- 
mount -t life -o ro /dev/dna /genetic/research