On Tue, 2010-10-05 at 08:34 -0400, Brandon Lozza wrote: > On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 6:37 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > that's the entire point of having trademarks. Free software projects are > > obliged to allow you to access and modify their code. They are not > > obliged to allow you to benefit from their reputation. It doesn't make > > any sense to say 'I think this product needs to be modified but I wish > > to be able to represent my modified product as being the same thing as > > the original product in order to benefit from the reputation attached to > > the original product'. > > -- > > Trademarks defeat the purpose of it being "free software". They impose > restrictions. The purpose of "free software" is not to have no restrictions. > You have to remove MoFo's artwork and perform a name > change or you're required to get permission from Mozilla to > redistribute a modified binary. That's not free. Yes, it is. > At the same time does > that logically effect the produced binary if we don't use the Firefox > branding? I don't think the artwork and branding makes it any faster > or more standards compliant or compatible with plugins. It would > instantly remove the restrictions that make it unmaintainable. Practically speaking, it would add an extra burden to the maintainers, who already do not have enough resources to deal with all the issues. Again, the reason we don't carry non-upstream patches in Firefox has nothing to do with the branding issue. It's because we don't have the resources to maintain non-upstream patches in Firefox. > Looks like RMS agrees too on the trademark issue. It would help if you quoted what he actually wrote, rather than paraphrasing it. (You may also want to note that the GPLv3, whose drafting process happened long after the trademark issue was public currency for debate, places no restrictions on trademarking free software.) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
