Alex Hudson wrote:
Where on the debian-legal is an accusation that debian are being persecuted? Are they - in your opinion - being persecuted?
I've pointed towards where I think it is. It's alluded to in http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/02/msg00004.html but maybe I dreamt it or was drunk when reading the original.
I don't know whether debian is being singled out as I can't remember how it started. Most probably, it was some debian user raised it and then a developer raised it with Mozilla. I think the initial complaints were about one of Thundercat or Sunbird which has a more enforced trademark than Firefox.
I think the complaints that debian doesn't act like a company are needless. That shouldn't have been a surprise.
I don't know about trademarks, but that's not the case with trade marks. Functionality is irrelevant.
If the trademark is used in the package description, that's a problem. However, there are other ways than the descriptions to make "apt-get install firefox" install notFirefox. I doubt that either those or /etc/alternatives/firefox would infringe the trademark, being not descriptions of a web browser.
[...] They cannot drop the name either, if we're being sensible.
They can abandon the trademark effort, if they're being sensible.
It's possibly a bit unfair to lay the blame for the trade mark issue at Mozilla's door, I feel. [...]
I think it's fair enough. Quite rightly, Mozilla hasn't put many people behind this effort. The debian package has been announced globally and frequently, often accompanied by a listing of changes that are made to the Mozilla version.
There are more important things for volunteers to work on than attacking other free software projects with over-zealous red tape. By not enforcing their trademarks as harshly previously, having no working trademark-free builds of their software and now trying such a hard line, I feel the Mozilla Foundation (MF) could be pretty close to a "submarine trademark" effect, happy to let distributors think that they are free software, then "you will respec' ma' authorita'" once popular.
I remain hopeful that MF take a more moderate line which formalises their past practice, rather than trying to raise the barrier up to their present written policies. If you know how MF's internals work, please go help convince them.