Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The notion that trade marked logos are
problematic is true for a specific
strict understanding of the GPL license as is prevalent under people who
adhere to the Debian way of thinking. It is definetly not universally shared
and it is a travesty that brought us Iceweasel.
The Iceweasel question is "Does it violate the definition of free
software to permit logos released under licenses permitting only
restricted distribution?" Most people other than Debian would say no,
because 1) they're a tiny part of the software and easily removed, and
2) they're trademarked, so you couldn't use them for much even if they
weren't copyrighted.
This is getting a bit off-topic, but the fundamental stumbling block
with Firefox wasn't the logos; rather it was Mozilla's
trademark-licensing policy. Nobody may distribute a browser named
"Firefox" unless it's either the unmodified official release, or first
clears any modifications with Mozilla. Debian considered that non-free,
because the right to distribute your own patched version is sort of the
whole point of free software. More practically, their security team
objected to having legal hurdles between writing a patch and being
permitted to ship it. So, they use a different name that doesn't come
with that "must get approval for all modifications" restriction.
(The logo issue is tangled in because the first modification Debian
tried to do that triggered a Mozilla objection was removing the Firefox
logo. But in the ensuing discussion, Mozilla made clear that they would
object to *any* modifications that weren't first cleared with them,
which is what made it impossible for Debian to continue using the
Firefox name, even for Debian developers who were on the other side of
the logo issue.)
-Mark