[Possibly OT] Trademarks

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 16:41:09 -0500, Christopher Aillon
<caillon at redhat.com> wrote:

> We want to stay as close to upstream as possible

Thats great... but you can do that using the iceweasel option.  But
when there is a disagreement over a patch and there will be at some
point.... using the non-ioeweasel options will prevent Fedora Core
developers from being able to apply the patch without upstream
approval. This a maintence burden... and it will happen at some point.
 If you have to keep getting approval for each patch you want to
apply.... you are bound to run into a situation where upstream
disagrees and you sit arguing about it for a month to keep the
branding agreement in place.  "As close as possible" doesn't mean
upstream will approve of all the changes.  Instead of burning that
disagreement bridge when we get to it... how about we avoid the
problem altogether and choose the iceweasel option because its the
most flexible.

> 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.

Using the iceweasel option doesn't prevent you or any other fedora
developer from working with upstream as much as possible.  But
disagreements do happen and I'd rather see fedora packaging things
free of trademark licensing requirements that impact the developers
ability to patch and maintain what is shipping inside Core, as much as
possible.
How much fun would it be if the linux kernel was packaged in a way
that demanded upstream approval of every patch before it was applied
to keep a branding agreement in place to prevent having to rename the
package and executables? That would be pretty unfun.

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

Can you find a way to enforce the same sort of rebuilding policy for
the fedora srpm so that anyone rebuilding and patching the mozilla
srpm has to use 'magic' to get the trademark protected marks?  Red Hat
has an agreement with mozilla, but downstream community members using
fedora's srpms do not.  It seems inappropriate to hand fedora
community srpms that short-circuit the trademark protections that the
upstream source have built in to prevent people from casually
rebuilding a package that is infringing on mozilla's marks.


-jef"Red Hat shouldn't be relying on special relationship agreements
to produce patched versions of anything in fedora"spaleta