Trademarks

[Andreas Thienemann]

On Sat, 2 Jul 2005, Owen Taylor wrote:

> My understanding is that there is no obligation to acknowledge
> trademarks in this sort of descriptive use. 
If you're right, that would be great.
 
> The worry I'd have about acknowledging *some* trademarks, is that there
> might be an implication that things that we don't acknowledge aren't
> trademarks.
Full ack.
Starting to acknowledge trademarks would most likely come down to opening 
Pandora's box.
We would have to check for every package name if it might be a trademark. 
We would have to check if the description mentions a name which might be a 
trademark (e.g. name is a implementation of something(R) protocol).

And the big danger is, the moment one of these trademarks is overlooked, 
someone might construct an accusation of willfull trademark violation, as 
we never mentioned his trademark.

Can of worms, don't go there.

> And having to acknowledge Linux, GNOME, KDE, etc, could clutter up
> the package descriptions just a bit :-)
Fun fact: Even projects with a trademarked name (bacula comes to mind) do 
not have a funky (R) symbol in the %description tag in the RPMS they ship.


bye,
 andreas