Eric: My comments weren’t directed at you. That would be shooting the messenger—after all, a quick read of the comments to my post the other day shows that you’re just going along with the community consensus.
My dismay is based on two basic things. First, while the web guys (you know, the ones we used to make fun of as not “real programmers”) are off inventing the future, the Debian community (or some significant subset anyway) sees this as the critical issue, and that makes me wonder how relevant free software is going to be in a few more years. It may be a matter of principle to some, but it paints everyone with the same lunatic fringe brush.
More than anything, though, it’s the, uh, inconsistency that really burns me. As I said in the aforementioned comments, I’ll be the first to agree that Mozilla is being overzealous, just like I thought Debian was being overzealous in its reaction to the Debian Common Core last year. As I said then:
I can say with 100% certainty that a trademark policy more restrictive than the one adopted by Linus Torvalds for Linux isn’t what the founder of this project had in mind.
Yet, now that the shoe is on the other foot, Debian is up in arms because another organization wants to enforce its trademark? Come on. You can’t have it both ways.
In other words, it’s not so much the outcome (which is basically inevitable, given MoCo’s stance) but the negative comments directed at Mozilla. (and the ridiculous, publicity-generating new name.) Mind, the generation of uproar and negative comments is a field in which the greater Debian community continues to break new ground.
– Chris
You’re quite right about the fact that Debian is being inconsistant here. My understanding is the DPL and other people are trying to make sure this is not the case anymore.
About the Linux trademark, though, I don’t get your point. I thought (I might be wrong) that Linux’s trademark is actually the opposite of what Mozilla is trying to do here. As far as I can tell, Linux does not charge Debian any money or makes them submit any patches upstream or anything else that Mozilla is demanding. They let all distribution use the trademarked “Linux” as long as they make less than XX a year. That seems a very sensible policy.
Sure, there’s a risk (the one that Mozilla is claiming) I would take Linux, and patch it the wrong way or something, which would reflect badly on the Linux “brand”, but that hasn’t been a problem so far.
It’s the outcome too, but Debian is hardly alone in taking the blame for that. Still, the fact that Mozilla shares in the responsibility for this fiasco is hardly a victory. As I said in the comments the other day: “So, you’re both wrong. Congratulations.” -ian
The point I was making a year ago was that I always operated with a similar trademark policy to Linux: If you do something Debian related (like Progeny Debian or Debian Planet), feel free to use the name, but don’t use it for something unrelated like a porn site etc. I was expressing surprise that the trademark policy had evolved into something different than that. -ian
I think the issues are slightly different. Firefox is the name of a product. Debian is both the name of a product and the name of an organisation. In the DCC case, it wasn’t clear whether the use of the word “Debian” related to the product or a relationship to the organisation. In fact, it became clear that several people interpreted “Debian Core Consortium” as implying that it was a consortium of people that made up the core of Debian rather than a consortium of people. It was a bad name in several ways. It also probably didn’t help that the first anyone in Debian knew of it was when it popped up in the press.
So I think it’s reasonable for organisations to protect their trademarks when that sort of confusion arises. I’d also have no objection to the Mozilla corporation preventing Debian from shipping applications under the Mozilla name if they weren’t Mozilla derived, or complaining about the formation of a “Mozilla Core Consortium” or even to request that we not call anything “Mozilla Firefox”.
But I don’t think that’s what’s happening in this case. Firefox isn’t an organisation name, and the de-facto acceptable policy in the free software community has been that there isn’t a problem in using product names to describe modified versions of the original product.
So personally, I (and I think many people in Debian) wouldn’t have an issue with the use of the Debian mark in contexts which make it clear that they’re referring to the product rather than the organisation. “Progeny Debian” is a good one – it’s clear that Progeny is the organisation and Debian is a product. Sadly, the fact that the organisation and the product share a name in Debian’s case makes this harder.
But really, your criticism cuts both ways. If you’re unhappy about how Debian behaved regarding the DCC’s name and feel that you were in the right, then you should also be unhappy with what Mozilla are now doing. Alternatively, if you think Debian behaved reasonably then the Mozilla corporation are also behaving reasonably and so Debian has absolutely no choice – I’m sure you’d agree that requiring every patch to be approved by Mozilla is impractical, and we’d been trying to negotiate a solution to this without a name change for well over a year.
The very worst thing you can accuse Debian of here is hypocrisy, and I think I’ve made a reasonable case for why even that isn’t valid.
Well said, Matthew. However well reasoned, though, you’re splitting hairs. At the end of the day, what’s happening here is that the owner of a trademark doesn’t like how that trademark is being used, and so they’re enforcing it. No matter how you slice it, that’s exactly what Debian did last year. -ian
The issue isn’t that Mozilla are enforcing the trademark in a way that they want to – the issue is with what Mozilla has decided that they want to do. It’s the particular policy that people are getting upset with, rather than the fact that there is a policy.
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that Mozilla don’t have the right to enforce the Firefox trademark. I think people are arguing that it’s a bad idea for them to enforce it in the particular manner that they’ve chosen to. The advantage to the Mozilla corporation of their current path is that they ensure that anyone receiving a binary called “Firefox” is going to have an almost identical user experience. The disadvantage is that it’s going to reduce the number of Linux distributions shipping the code under the firefox name, and (as I’ve argued) may discourage innovation. I (and many in Debian) believe that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, and so think that the current trademark policy is a bad thing for the community.
The DCC case was different. As far as I could tell, there was no argument for why the use of the name “Debian” in “Debian Core Consortium” was of any benefit to Debian whatsoever. There was an obvious downside – many people assumed you were associated with Debian the organisation rather than Debian the product. It’s quite possible that if you’d started by choosing a less confusing name (and possibly by, say, letting Debian know about it before letting the press know about it), there wouldn’t have been any significant objection. I regret the fact that Debian didn’t have a coherent trademark policy back then, and I regret the fact that it still doesn’t.
In effect, I think a sensible trademark policy for Debian should grant permission for derivative works and websites to utilise the Debian name and marks, providing said usage does not cause confusion over whether the website or work or project or whatever is officially affiliated with Debian. If Firefox had a policy along these lines, there wouldn’t have been a problem. But even with a policy like this, I think it’s likely that the “Debian Core Consortium” would have been a problem. And the fact that a perfectly reasonable policy would distinguish between the two cases we’re discussing indicates that they aren’t exactly the same.
That’s a very sensible trademark policy from my point of view. We’ll have to agree to disagree that the DCC case is different though (and I certainly disagree there was no benefit to Debian—namely, more support for Debian in the commercial world, where it’s hugely underrepresented—because if there wasn’t, I wouldn’t have done it). I view Debian the product as a collection of packages, so I’m not sure I understand why something called Debian Common Core is any less Debian than anything else, just like the Debian Firefox with a few patches is any less Firefox than the unmodified version. For the record, it was never called the Debian Core Consortium—that was a moniker given to it by a reporter, presumably in reference to the Linux Core Consortium it was intended to replace; and we didn’t go to the press, the story was leaked (and not be me, either—if anything, I wasn’t terribly happy because we were nowhere near ready to talk about it, one reason being we hadn’t talked to Debian yet.. no pretexting though :-). -ian
I’m not arguing that the DCC itself provided no benefits to Debian, merely that the way that the word Debian was used in its name provided no benefits to Debian. “Debian-based distributions alliance” or something like that would have been absolutely fine with me, but “Debian Common Core” (sorry about the Core Consortium reference – I remember that now) did appear to confuse people.
Again, I respect this point of view. What bothers me is the inconsistency: “I’m not sure I understand why something called Debian Common Core is any less Debian than anything else, just like the Debian Firefox with a few patches is any less Firefox than the unmodified version.” If it’s unreasonable for Mozilla to object to the latter, is it not unreasonable for Debian to object to the former too? -ian
Ian, to me the two cases seem very different. The name “Debian Common Core” suggested that your project was going to be more fundamental than Debian itself: it appeared to define a particular subset of Debian as the core of Debian. It looked like a takeover, something that, if it were to be done, should have been agreed to by the Debian project. The equivalent would be Debian changing the name of Firefox to “Real Firefox” or “Firefox Unchained” or something like that, implying that their Firefox was somehow more “true” than the official one.
If the Debian project had told you that you couldn’t use the word “Debian” if you included any patches that the Debian project signed off on, that would be equivalent trademark abuse.
All uses of trademarks aren’t equivalent. Consider the Ada language. The US Department of Defense holds the trademark, however, the way they manage it is to say that a compiler can only be called an Ada compiler if it passes a particular testsuite (and gnat, the GNU Ada Translator, does). That kind of use benefits the public, because the mark become at least a minimal quality guarantee.
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