[Pkg-meego-maintainers] Packaging the MeeGo stack on Debian - Use the name ?

[Mike Hommey]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 11:16:28PM +0100, Francesco Poli wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:26:02 -0600 Steve Langasek wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 04:16:46AM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote:
> [...]
> > > Unfortunately, there's no way that Debian can possibly comply with the
> > > compliance specification as written. [I only got as far as §2.3 to
> > > find an obvious deal-breaker.]
> > 
> > > This sounds like yet another case where an unbranded name[1] is
> > > required for actual use in the community, ala iceweasel.
> > 
> > This situation is not analogous to the iceweasel case.  For iceweasel, there
> > was a copyright license on the graphics included in firefox that imposed
> > trademark-like restrictions; so under the DFSG the graphics had to go, and
> > the maintainer took the decision to also rename the package at the same
> > time.
> 
> That's not how I recall the Mozilla trademark issues.
> 
> Quoting from http://lists.debian.org/debian-news/2006/msg00044.html :
> 
> [...]
> | Firefox becomes Iceweasel. Due to trademark [47]issues the Debian
> | project felt impelled to rename the Firefox web browser to Iceweasel
> | and the Thunderbird mail client to Icedove. Roberto Sanchez
> | [48]explained that the new packages don't contain non-free artwork
> | from the [49]Mozilla Foundation and that security updates will be
> | properly backported. The trademark [50]policy requires that such
> | packages are not distributed under the original name, hence the new
> | names.
> | 
> |  47. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/12/msg00328.html
> |  48. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/10/msg00665.html
> |  49. http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/
> |  50. http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/policy.html
> [...]
> 
> As far as I understand it, the issue was that the Mozilla Foundation
> wanted the Debian Project to distribute their "products" under their
> trademarked names, with their non-free graphical logos and only with
> selected patches approved by them (solution A).
> If these terms could not be complied with (and they were too
> restrictive for the Debian Project, obviously), then the graphical
> logos had to be removed, and the packages renamed (solution B).

It's simpler than that, really. The logo was non-free, which meant we
couldn't use it. So we shipped firefox without the logo. Mozilla didn't
want something called firefox without the logo. End of story.

The patch policy is completely orthogonal.

Mike