Re: [gNewSense-users] Trademarks In gNewSense and the status of the CDDL License

[Brian Brazil]

On Nov 13, 2007 4:29 PM, Kevin Dean <address@hidden> wrote:
> I've been bouncing e-mails back and forth between Joerg Shilling
> pertaining to the cdrecord issues that have been raised several times.
>
> Essentially, we've worked the issue down as far as we can go and I
> think we both clearly understand each other.
>
> I'm at a point now where before I can decide to take any action on the
> cdrtools bugs, I need to find out the official stance of gNewSense on
> trademarks.
>
> Mozilla used their trademark to prevent the proliferation of altered
> versions of their browser called Firefox and using the Firefox logo.
> Our responce to this issue was to re-brand the browser as BurningDog.
>
> I have to now question if that was the best move. Why?
>
> A user can not download the BurningDog source, rebrand it as Firefox
> and distribute it. In this case, users who download the BurningDog
> source are AS restricted from distributing it under the name "Firefox"
> as we were. This isn't a license issue exactly, it's a trademark
> issue.

I can't rebrand it Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera either - does that
fundamentally affect the freedom of BurningDog too?
I say no - the name of the tool is not essential to its functionality, and
so preventing me from using some names does not really restrict
my freedom of what I can do with firefox's code.

> Both Debian's DFSG and the Free Software Foundation approve the CDDL
> as a Free Software license but gNewSense has not addressed this
> license.

In general, If both Debian and the FSF approve a license, I see no
reason why we wouldn't too.

Brian

> If gNewSense accepts this license then it means by upgrading cdrtools
> we can close a bug - newer versions of cdrtools have moved to a CDDL
> license solving the issue with the build system and the CDDL
> specifically grants authors the right to require modified versions not
> use any trademarks.
>
>
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