[Possibly OT] Trademarks

Christopher Aillon caillon at redhat.com
Mon Jan 10 21:41:09 UTC 2005


Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> What happens if you want to put in a patch into fedora that upstream
> mozilla does not agree with?  If you have to continue to get upstream
> approval before every patch is applied, don't you run the risk of
> disagreement which will necesitate renaming and replacing the icons?
> Isn't this a potential maintence issue for Core?  Disagreements do
> happen.  I have no problem with mozilla protecting its marks. But I
> would prefer fedora to package mozilla using the iceweazel option and
> not use mozilla's marks at all to forestall any abrupt branding change
> required over disagreeable patches.

We want to stay as close to upstream as possible.  I have been an 
upstream developer before joining Red Hat, and continue pushing my 
changes upstream.  The icons patches are preparing to be landed upstream 
(I've sort of let them languish a little because of holidays and RHEL 
bugs I've been working on).

My thoughts in general on this are basically that one of the reasons we 
are using "Firefox" is for the brand name recognition.  Websites, ISVs, 
  etc. will say they work with Firefox, not Iceweasel, not Epiphany. 
People complained ON THIS LIST because we were not using "Firefox" at 
one point.  Well, we are now.  If we decide to drop "Firefox", it might 
make more sense to switch back to Epiphany rather than Iceweasel, which 
fits in stronger with GNOME and the desktop.

I'd like however to work together with the Mozilla Foundation rather 
than against them.  Obviously, they want us as a distributor and we want 
to distribute their software.


>>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.
> 
> 
> Are you talking about the upstream source or the fedora srpm here?

Upstream source.




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