 Okay, so, first, this is going to be where I'm just, I am, sounds a bit obscene, I'm not a lawyer, I'm a little bit of a lawyer. I don't play a lot on TV, but it doesn't matter, I'm still talking about this stuff, it's not big of a device, it's not many of that stuff, but it's good to discuss, it's good to come up with ideas, law probably isn't as concrete as we think it is anyway, so it's good to talk about these things and get these come up with ideas and certainly if anyone in here is a lawyer, that's good too, but... So, what's a trademark? A trademark is a logo, it's a name, or it can be a phrase as well. The point of the trademark is to show, to create distinctiveness for a product or a service and to show the origin of that service, so that you know that if I get a Coke, that is actually something from the Coke Corporation and not from the local regular or anything like that, or some more, you know, that Coke is not Pepsi and that these things are for an even though they might be similar products, you know, where they came from and who the producer is and you can base your, you must be able to base your consumer judgment based particularly on the logo or the trademark or the name of the product. So, the trademarks have to be used or they can be lost, they can be defended, so trademarks have to be defended or they can be lost, so companies that have trademarks seem to actively pursue anyone who used the mark in a way that they don't like or that use it in a confusing manner if they want to keep the mark. And there's something called generic side as well where the mark becomes a generic term, so if you let the mark be used in other products or services or as sort of the common refer to the type of product it is, so if you think of Band-Aid or Kleenex, those are actually become more popular than say bandages or facial tissue. People use Kleenex more than they use facial tissue so this is very problematic from trademark perspective because it's not actually referring to the product that it's not referring to the specific product anymore, it's referring to the actual, sorry, the specific manufacturer's product, it's referring to the actual product itself in general, so this can be a cause, this can cause more problems, it can cause actually the trademark holder to lose their trademark if they're working to court or something like that because it can be argued that this has now become a generic term for the product and not actually, isn't actually distinctive anymore, isn't actually associated with manufacturing more just a name for the product, so this is something that's, this is something why you have to defend the mark as much as possible. So, in general, there are two types of trademarks, there are unregistered ones and unregistered marks, and unregistered mark, so these are all symbols of what they mean, is it unregistered and this is unregistered, and the difference is an unregistered mark as the unregistered mark is not registered, you don't have to pay money to use it, it's just through use, if you create a product and you start to use that name for the product and you start to associate it with it as a trademark, you use it as a trademark, you probably want to put this little key M there to start sort of marking your territory, I guess it would be, and it doesn't require you to do anything else, you just need to start using it and claiming it as a trademark and obviously, hopefully there's no other trademark associated with that sort of type of product or anything like that, it's a little bit harder to defend later on, but really just unregistered to make a trademark, you just use it, it's purely through use, you don't have to do anything, and it's there, it's sort of like, if you create a product, most jurisdictions don't have to register copyright, so it's the same sort of thing, you don't have to register an unregistered mark, so these are really easy to obtain because it requires basically no effort, you need to find out if anything else is using a similar name in the same sort of product spaces and when you're working in or else you're going to have problems later on, but it's very easy to use. So a registered mark is something that you have to pay money to get and it's generally not to register it in multiple jurisdictions, so you can register the mark in the United States or in Britain or in other countries, but it's usually sort of a per-country basis that you register the mark in. It costs, I don't actually know, several thousand dollars, I'm sure I think someone was saying in Britain it's about a thousand pounds or maybe two thousand pounds, but it costs a little bit of money if you can get it in the United States it's closer to ten thousand dollars, it costs a lot of money to register, you've got a lot of money to register but they afford a lot more protection because now it's on the books, it's considered a registered mark and you're going to have a lot easier time in a court case actually defending it or actually getting people to stop using it or being able to enforce it if you consider people. So the registered and unregistered laws are fairly uniform internationally as far as my research is determined China doesn't actually have unregistered trademarks so you need to, so this doesn't work in China and probably a few other countries but China being the large one, most people will be aware of that so trademarks particularly can't cover functional aspects of your product so if the product needs to be named so if your product needs a particular name to function so if, if say you were a programmer it needs to be called, like if it checked its own name to see if it was called Fubar and it wouldn't run if it wasn't called Fubar then you couldn't enforce the trademark, you couldn't have someone have to change the name to something else because it's actually tied to the functionality of the product so if the name is anyway tied to the functionality of the product it needs to be named something to work properly it needs to have some logo that would work properly it can't be very difficult to say to enforce it as a trademark as well you couldn't compel someone to remove the trademark that actually depended on the functionality of what you were doing and what you were using so that's the percentual of trademarks so we're going to some of the trademark problems that have been happening in the source community in general so these ones are more upstream two really recent examples are ethereal and game which became a wire shark and pigeon I think that's not right so in both these cases in this case the developer was working for a company and the company actually held the trademark for ethereal and then he left the company and couldn't actually secure the rights to the trademarks so when he left he changed the upstream name to wire shark to avoid any sort of confluence and stuff like that and in the case of game AOL in fact came down feeling hard at the only game developers and I think it was fairly long protracted negotiations and stuff to be able to to see if they could use the name which they couldn't and eventually they had to change it to it was also done in high and closed doors I don't actually know the details of that but it took a while so these aren't really this is not really a big problem for them being itself I mean obviously having to create having to change the name of the packages to go through a lot of kind of busy work is annoying to say the least and it would be great if we had easier ways of renaming packages and having up the upgrades would be very seamless and not having to create these funny dummy packages with the existing name but we don't really have the help that we would have so another example here is programs with trademarks Apache and OpenOffice.org both assert that they had trademarks in terms of Apache and OpenOffice.org and in fact the Apache 2 license explicitly says this license does not confer any rights to the Apache trademark or the federal logo that they have so we are distributing these things for quite a while now and it's interesting that as far as I can tell I couldn't find any reference to any discussions about the trademarks in fact so it's a bit puzzling I guess in that we don't have any sort of formal agreement with Apache or OpenOffice.org to use them as their trademarks in the programs that we distribute but we do it and they are not complaining and we're certainly not complaining about it so I'm not sure exactly probably nothing needs to be done now but it's interesting to see that there are projects that have trademarks that aren't burdening us with additional terms or conditions or anything like that so it's interesting to contrast this with our approach to copyright which is that where the copyright license and the code is unclear and we don't feel that we have a problem with the license which I think we don't include the software at all and the reason for the difference is that if we come up with some problem later that's a copyright problem we end up having to work enough to have to throw the program out at that point whereas if it's just a trademark problem then we can fix it just by renaming it which is a pain but there's no point doing that pain now if we could get away with doing it later absolutely and it's also been unclear it's similar to our stance on patents where we ignore the problem unless someone explicitly comes to us and says there's a problem even if we know that there's a patent on something and we certainly do know that there are patents on many things and they cover a lot of the programs we don't necessarily take any action until someone points out that there's a problem so yeah it is quite a bit different than what we can call hand copyrights and I'm not saying it's bad I'm just saying it's just interesting to point out that this is what we're running this is what happens and it sort of seems to work it used to be very popular programs this is a recent case where it was a bit crazy I don't know if anyone followed this followed this mailing list that happened on the Beyond 3 mailing list Beyond 3 maintainer or upstream of it I'm definitely saying that so I'm going to end this one felt that that the TrueType font engine in the ex TrueType libraries did a horrible job of rendering fonts they explicitly didn't include support for it in Beyond 3 and a lot of a lot of people disagreed with him and I think Slackware was the one that sort of fueled all this but the Slackware package for for Beyond 3 contained a patch to let it use XFT instead of just regular bitmap fonts and the maintainer sort of asserted that this was too radical a change for it to be called Beyond 3 anymore and that he asserted that he had the trademark on Beyond 3 and that anything that had this patch in it could not call itself Beyond 3 or include Beyond 3 in the name of the package or in any way refer to Beyond 3 and proceeded to then have a crazy sort of diatribe the evils of open source software and how it's stealing people's work and to move it up it's quite insane he really kind of went mad or at least started becoming a huge role and just was unbelievably inflexible about the whole thing and really lost his mind but I mean the problem here too is that he can now I think in Demi we're actually going to change the name as well I haven't actually kept up with the list on that but I think we have to change the name because we incorporate some changes too I'm not sure if it's the XFT change but we have some other changes that it also seems kind of ridiculous that we can't port these little useful patches into the package so there's a lot less recourse here if he had gone off the deep end and said my package is now under the you must send me $50 license it would be fairly easy just to take the latest version and continue the work with someone else but but now we can't really we can never continue it but we've lost that the branding that Ion 3 was and we can't we're going to have to cure it come up with a new name or someone's going to come up with a new name and continue the work and possibly work it off into different branches obviously because it won't include a lot of useful upstream patches or downstream patches so this is another kind of crazy example of some of these trademarks to try to compel developers to not change his code or not to do things with his program that he felt were you know, not in keeping with the spirit of his program but yet are are something we take for granted when we're talking about open source licenses something that are easy to do but he's almost encouraged by things like the GPL or other things like that so it's kind of very interesting and to come to this is the situation I guess I had the most experience with being sort of directly involved in the the re-daming of Firefox and IOS and then so for people who don't know the history I guess I guess in which was 2004-2005 but what was then the Mozilla Foundation came to us and said they were happy that we were calling our version of Firefox Mozilla Firefox because it hadn't come from Mozilla it was being distributed by us and they were also sort of I think they were a bit unhappy that we weren't using the the actual Fox logo that's become very popular and the reason we weren't using that Fox logo is because the license on both the copyright license and the trademark license on that low bill are not free so it doesn't actually allow you to modify it or do any of the things that we would expect from a copyright license in something like Debian I mean that's the exception of the whole source code is that this one sort of graphic is not free the rest of the GPL and MPL and so eventually we came to an agreement where we could use the term they wanted us to drop the term but they said it was all right we still continued to use the word Firefox and we couldn't have to use the logo because of our objections to the copyright so it was anyway much discussion you can look at the ban list about this there was lots of discussions going on about what we should do and at the end it was a good compromise that we could do that and they said they would monitor the quality of our package from time to time make sure that it was up to the standard that they felt the trademark deserved and that it was still a good package and it wasn't too divergent from what they considered Firefox to be so I went ahead and eventually renamed the package name from Mozilla Firefox to Firefox and and all the Fox a little bit and then that persisted for about a year I guess in that situation and eventually the trademarks for Mozilla all the Mozilla trademarks for Firefox and Mozilla got transferred to the Mozilla Corporation which had been created to receive money from very corporations and actually higher developers to work on Firefox and to pay people to do this sort of thing and they came back to us and said that that now it wasn't permissible to use the Firefox name without using the Firefox logo and again large mailing lists that were consumed and and we explained to them we couldn't use the logo because of the non-free copyright the sorry non-free copyright on the logo and they said that they felt that because it was a trademark that giving away the ability to create derivatives was weakening the brand and weakening the mark and various things like that so they wouldn't budge and they wouldn't budge so we were forced to relate it to something else there is another thing that they wanted which is that they wanted essentially all of the patches that Demian applied to its Firefox package to be approved by them and they asked the same thing to Ubuntu now Ubuntu have actually gone down that route now which is why the Ubuntu Firefox packages are still in Firefox in practice that kind of patch approval process was more of an annoyance than a serious hindrance but I did find myself I was at the time and sure I ran about this time I stopped being the Ubuntu Firefox maintainer and I remember having being distracted from doing useful work by having to justify certain changes and why did you do this and then had an argument about it really and I didn't see what happened to most of the sort of tough case changes there were some changes to things like the default ladies headlines thing and the bookmarks and those kind of things which were really very sensitive from their point of view and I got quite out of the loop on those discussions so I don't know exactly where that's all so that for Debian it was quite clear if it had just been the logo that was the problem it might have been possible to come up with some fudge but really they were saying Debian needed to approve have all of the patches approved and really they were saying at that point in public at least that they need to be pre-approved and there's a general work-flight thing for Debian that would be impossible and in any case that really isn't free software anymore if we have to ask them to do the mission I don't think it would have been possible for the workflow position but it would have been again annoying at this point it's becoming not the fundamentals of free software sort of being co-opted purely to have the name the package and the branding to be consistent with what they think is good I mean it's a hard decision because it's become they've spent a lot of time marketing it and they've spent a lot of resources and effort and people are very excited about it to have an alternative and even on Windows it's become very popular so people know about it and it's hard to get rid of that sort of free publicity where we can say Firefox is in deviant and then people know what that is and it can be more attractive to Debian just because of that the allure of that name and what people think and Ice Weasel obviously has less of an allure so to get back to the story we've said that this was not free thinking and that this was having to sign off all the patches would be very free software and burn some so we looked around and in fact when the issue had come up the first time we had Nathaniel in the road had come up with the name Ice Weasel in case we actually had to eventually change the name and I think he was sort of suggesting it as a joke but it actually came to be known as even the Wasilla people started to refer to in their trademark policy document the Ice Weasel Clause where people could if you need to make massive changes you've had to use some of the name and actually refer to it as the Ice Weasel Clause it would become famous enough but it won't have a problem about not having an allure well yeah so I mean the fact that it was actually being used as the sort of the not Firefox name gave it a certain amount of popularity initially and I actually threw out sort of an informal poll on my blog to see what the next name should be and overwhelmingly it was that was the one people voted for it doesn't lack perhaps a bit of sexiness and a bit of appeal but people already knew it and it was associated with Firefox so I guess it made sense it was a bit complicated because the new project had actually created a free version of Firefox called Ice Weasel with a capital or GNU Ice Weasel and but no no no no they but because the popular name went to it anyway and in fact as far as I can tell the GNU Ice Weasel project has completely stagnated and hasn't gone anywhere at the last time I looked which in the middle of it was several months ago but it was several months after the 2.0 release and they were still sort of packaging a 1.5 Firefox GNU Ice Weasel release so yeah GNU Ice Weasel has nothing to do with our name sorry our Ice Weasel and GNU Ice Weasel have nothing to do with each other they have nothing to do with each other because in GNU developers they asked me once that if some people from there again have reported to have a promise with GNU Ice and they said they thought it was because we were staffed towards Weasel which was version of 1.5 and that's how I mean it's confusing for people it is slightly confusing and perhaps I should have chosen or we should have chosen a different name just because of that but because it was so popular I thought and because it had actually originated within our project that seemed like we had claim or something like that so like moral rights I actually I think my favorite was in fact Free Fox but I thought again that would be a bit too close to what to the original Firefox name complain a bit and you don't have so I thought to make sure it was reminiscent of the original name but impossible to confuse the name not understanding the patch situation has there been any consideration of modifying EFSG to allow branding elements to be not free no one has proposed that as far as I know I think given the way that recent GRs have gone on these kind of subjects it's very clear but some proposal would fail so if Ubuntu keeps the name Firefox they must do the branding elements so if you look at the free software guidelines the guidelines in Ubuntu actually are a bit weaker than the DFSG DFSG DFSG yes and a lot of these questions are to do with the way that the guidelines are applied anyway and Demi tends to take quite a hard line and then to take what they would describe I suppose as a pragmatic line because the rest of us might think I was weak but I mean the much of what I'm going to say that they're explicitly saying the software must be free and everything else is sort of I can't remember what the exact wording is but on a case by case basis they won't make these sort of decisions about what to be included in what not it's much more of course I'm quite sensitive to this because I'm very keen on getting OpenJK or Open Source Java into main and have it pass our compatibility test so that it could be branded Java-compatible TM so that people can recognize that the JVM and Debian like Firefox is something that they know and they recognize I suspect that some trademark people would not really be thrilled about allowing people to modify the Java-compatible Pippenstein logo for example so I think there are some detailed discussions there that maybe would be better had later in this session or in our current conversation but I don't think that Debian's requirements are inherently incompatible with some's requirements here so I think a compromise should be possible and in fact if we can't end up using the Steam logo I think someone is actually the little Java Duke logo is in fact very liberally licensed that's James Gosling who licensed it under BSD so you go to town with Duke imagery and 3D models so that would certainly be an excellent replacement that would be you know it would be very easy replacement to make or something that's still very much associated with Java Duke is definitely so sensitive with Java but it's not sure absolutely so yes this is still kind of a unique situation I don't think there's anything quite like this has happened and again it was as complicated as when we mix up copyright and trademark issues that we couldn't get them to reconcile I guess even though probably you can quite easily have a free trademark a free copyright license and something and still have a more restricted trademark license on that that's a thing because they are not the same thing patents, trademarks, copyrights they're branded as intellectual property but they're not interrelated in any way in the law or anything like that so maybe one day we could rate that but we would have to be so I guess questions sort of what do we do in these sort of situations how should we be making sort of decisions when this sort of trademark conflict comes up so I guess our real guiding document in the project and the thing that we can most of us agree on at least in principle is the DFSG and DFSG was written with copyrights in mind so it doesn't really necessarily apply to trademarks and patents or other things but it is certainly a document that describes sort of what we could consider our values to be so it's quite possible to use it as sort of to use it for our decision making and maybe not necessarily have to follow it to the letter or follow it strictly as we do for copyrights because copyrights are quite a bit stronger than trademarks are I mean the worst thing that could happen with the trademarks is that to remove some graphics we have to change the name and certainly if something is a useful piece of free software as FireFox and I Suisse was some people actually call for it to be removal based on the fact that the trademark was not free and that seems a bit too strong in the reaction considering how many people use it and how useful this software really is so in fact the DFSG actually has a provision for this in a copyright license I guess that the DFSG4 says that you can be if the license can compel you to change the name or the version number based on whether you've changed the name or whether you've redistributed or not so that sort of non-freeness I guess so that the fact that you're forced to change the name on the program is sort of condoned by this free software guideline so is there really a reason to think it shouldn't be condoned for trademarks as well again our current strategy for the trademarks is the ostrich method where we sort of ignore it bury our heads in the sand and not care until someone actually brings it to us as a violation or a problem which is really how trademark law works in that the trademark owners have to police their marks and they have to be the ones to come to you with problems and I don't know if there's actually willful infringement damage as there are patents where if you actually knew you could get it sued one but certainly that would be a slight it's possible that sort of thing exists I don't actually know for trademark law the other thing is that because things like package names actually have a functional aspect to them it's not so much covered by trademark law or probably shouldn't be and even the mozilla I think unofficially one of the mozilla maintenance one of the mozilla stream authors actually mentioned this to you I can't really say that the package name because it has this very functional aspect within the package system it's used to resolve dependencies and it's used in this fashion we could theoretically get away with keeping the package names the same even in the case of a trademark dispute it would be confusing if we had to change them if we kept the name of the package and had to change all the names within the program to be something different but in theory we could do this and it allows us to do things like an upgrade package to be able to get to an explosion so there's still a Firefox package in Demian right now or maybe it was been I think Mike Bennett would be talking about this it allows us to provide a file called username Firefox that does something to stop in fact yes that's true too because these are part of the functionality we should not instead of typing the name or I mean not protected in a trademark because the trademark law can't force you to do something if it will adversely affect the functionality of the program I mean probably if we can we should probably still keep the Firefox package just because it's some random user completely unaware of everything installs Demian and looks for Firefox but oh yeah I'm going to install this size user and we can ask him something if we say that that provides the quality enough if we say that that is the reason why we are including the Firefox package in Demian then that motivation that is a violation of the trademark because precisely the trademark is intended to stop people who are looking for the trademark thing finding the thing that's not the trademark thing oh yeah I think you know recent case law surrounding Google AdWords is very interesting in this context but maybe this is a bit too detailed for this but if we keep the package going in because there are other packages other software depends on it then that's not a violation of the trademark because it can break if we remove it so you said you could not publish for example a web page there's a cheat sheet between Game and Pigeon and Firefox and Ice Weasel because that would be I think that would be alright on the grounds that you're clearly distinguishing the two things right so if you do that then you're not confused and if you have a meta package it's functional so that's okay it depends it depends on what's functionality I think the right answer in this case is from Demian's actual practical point of view is provided if we don't make the upstream to upset then nobody will get sued and this is not something that we would like SPI lawyers to be trying to argue with because it's very much a kind of gray area so user bin Firefox that's very clearly functional if we change that name lots of stuff will still break and it will keep breaking very so obviously we're going to have to keep that forever but the transitional package really the best thing probably to do is to keep it until somebody complains and to clearly mark mark it as transitional even if it's long-lived and the thing is we're allowed to this doesn't force us to lie about its origins we can actually say this is based on Firefox in the package description we just can't claim it to be Firefox itself it's perfectly alright to use the mark in that sort of way in fact I think your description includes I did say that this used to be a name for this is based on Firefox and it used to be called these other names because Firefox had a long history of changing its name but yeah so I mean hopefully there should be ways to find it if someone does a search for Firefox because they are it is based on that in fact it is largely the same more changes than we did in Firefox and other packages have done similar things Ubuntu package now has fewer patches in it because it is no longer derived from WM as a sort of straight cascade but I mean from the user perspective it seems to have still more changes I guess some of the Ubuntu alternatives can make more changes to programs anyway so the changes that Ubuntu make will be more usable in the month of Debian way than usual so and I guess one of the issues I brought up to when I came around was that DFS G8 sort of prevents us from having a license that is specific to Debian and I sort of brought this up as an objection to having a trademark license for Debian and not necessarily for anyone who was driving us and I think when the first round of this happened we were discussing all this not the current sort of first time this came up in 2005 I guess it was the compromise that we struck was that if the downstream did not modify in any way they were considered to have this sort of carte blanche trademark license they could use the package downstream but if they did modify it they were not entitled to be able to use the Firefox trademark automatically so I don't know if this is the compromise that the project wants to accept in general for this sort of thing or if we want to think about it more I don't know but certainly the downstream the drivers of us who are now very many to actually have to go through and resolve trademark issues if they derive from Debian whereas which they wouldn't have to do because obviously copyright issues have been further taken care of I mean to draw a parallel to patents if a large software company or Microsoft I don't think we would take it so obviously these sorts of things these sorts of Debian specific deals are not I mean not the trademarks and patents are the same thing but they're not and patents are much more horrible I guess or painful to resolve or problematic than trademarks can ever be but I'm not sure if we want to go down the road of getting specific trademark licenses just for Debian to be considered free by Debian is that everybody else or not just Debian has to have exactly all of the same freedoms that Debian and basically that Debian doesn't get some kind of special deal because we are trying to preserve the freedom of our users to modify and derive and all the rest of it but the fact is that I mean these things were drawn up Debian free software were drawn up with copyright in mind and that's obviously that's very important to not have it every specific license because trademarks are easier to get around because all you have to do is rename it maybe we want to be a bit more I don't know not so liberal about it because of the fact that also the upstreams the owners of the trademarks actually need to maintain such a a much tighter control than they do over the use of the trademark so it's very hard for them to come up with a license that's acceptable for use of the trademark unless it's something like I mean the classic example is I think it was actually a copyright thing but Tech had sort of a compatibility suite that there was a test suite that you had to pass to be able to call yourself tech which is a very reasonable way of doing this from a very developed perspective a very technical centric world view where that makes a lot of sense but programs like Firefox don't have these kind of test suites and a lot of GUI applications it's hard to sort of say this is because it's so tied to the look and feel of it to some degree it's much harder to say whether this is actually like a test method to test whether it looks right also to some extent tech was grandfathered because it was done such a long time ago and so on and so forth so I think if you had a similar program nowadays you might well find that the answer I don't know it seems like a very reasonable thing to require because just for the same reason as as for the same reason as that I don't want to be associated if you've gone and taken my program and modified it substantially enough I don't really want to be associated with any more because those things I don't want it to do then in the past what mainly happened in the free software world is that the name of the program has not been treated as a trademark and if somebody takes your program and does something crazy with it then you send them insults not lawsuits and this by and large has worked very well and the answer to these kind of things about oh well otherwise we can't lose our trademark is just to say well we won't we have to call the program something it's not the trademark then because it's just the legal system for dealing with trademarks it's hostile for all these reasons you've described it's hostile to the things that we need to do for free software and doesn't fit at all well so it's alright if there's we don't really mind if there's a trademark which may or may not be enforced by somebody at some point we can sort of you know as you say bury our heads in the sand but when people come to us and start making difficulties and say we have to change the name of the program for derivative it's not very well for Ubuntu Ubuntu can change the name of their program in Ubuntu we've got a couple of dozen developers to do that but most derivatives are not that large and not that well funded and changing the name of some well integrating program is a serious matter but tell me in major jurisdictions if you distribute something that's under trademark well if you lose the the sewer or whatever it is going backwards I mean it is retroactive you cannot just say we change it from now on doing experiments I got a bit confused you mean that like they can sue you retroactively you've been using the name for three years they can only sue you for actual damages in general which is almost impossible for them to prove in a case like this what he says would be something like you could be compelled to change it in all your history and make the name disappear and it would be hard for us to do because in a certain sense I mean we have a snapshot and we have all versions of the archive we have release distributions and things I'm not so sure that would be necessary because I think that I mean it's possible they would compel us to change it in the current release but it's not like we can reach into people's computers and take it away I think as long as we are not like our current software is not distributing it because we can especially we can point and say no one's using any of this old stuff or this is purely for archival purposes it's probably not a big deal but again in theory I'm not a lawyer I don't win that might be a problem in practice I think the trademarks that's not going to be a problem basically because trademarks are just about you know the goodwill associated with some name and the enormous shift sort of will arise if a trademark holder were to go down that path what I think probably inhibit them with patents we're very much more at risk there and it's very clear that they could demand you know everything you bought from the archive they could demand all sorts of things in principle that's happened in court there were actual physical objects that were recalled because there were many violations and the person who distributed them was mainly the buyer court to offer the people who'd been given them originally as some kind of freebie gift was made to buy them back from the consumers so it's really scary but in any case it's an entirely different conversation but in any case we should change the name Roswell and Stable we probably have to change if this ever came to a head in court or really became a problem we probably have to change it to Stable in practice if it came to that we would change the branding in Stable and not the package name because to change the package name in Stable and we would be able to because changing the package name in break systems would cause things to break so what kind of license is most like ADA where they said you had to pass a test fleet in order to call your compiler an ADA compiler what kind of license so that sounds like the historical sort of tech license where this is covered by the devil free software brand license it's fairly reasonable sort of thing to ask I don't really see a problem with that in general did it actually have a trademark on it was it actually a copyright license that said that I have no idea the legal situation I just know that that's very similar to what tech had at one point I think it doesn't even work that's easier for distributors to deal with because they'll be able to tell when they've we don't need to go to a third party we need to go to a third party and ask them for permission as we've been in the case with Firefox we can just run a test suite and say whether this we can literally run a program to tell us whether we can call it ADA or not it's a volume I think it's very useful it would be used by everybody absolutely but the problem with like a more graphical environment is that it's harder to test with things like does it look how I think it should look because this is what they're more concerned with with Firefox and other stuff I think when they looked at our patches at one point they were sort of confused by we had increased the dialogue with those sides of the preferences dialogue and they thought this was kind of a crazy they were very concerned about these sorts of minor modifications to the look and feel that really didn't amount to a whole lot it didn't really change the program in any substantial way this would be harder things to test for on the way so I think I've got one last slide here I'm going to make the queries screwed up here alright well the last slide we was talking about name for thing and if we actually end up having to do it something similar to the ISIS situation how should we handle it if I handled it as well as could have been handled because of things like the new ice weasel and I don't think anyone else besides Debbie is using the name maybe some of our drivers are but certainly not a lot of the larger drivers are using it so I mean one of the points the reason why these white companies being trademarked on the software is because they want to they want to create a brand you know recognition of this thing and if we fork the name we're losing out on all that branding free advertising and goodwill and association with that so I'm just trying to come up with ideas or wondering what else are ideas about how to create recognition for sort of a name fork if we have to do it and I think I'm hoping it won't become more popular the fact is that software is becoming kind of a big business and companies are probably looking for ways to keep a tighter control over the software that they produce and you know to create that sort of branding and recognition and sort of sell that in the various ways that they're making money without selling the software so much I think it's less of a problem than you seem to think it is the most unfortunate thing about this it's a little ice-weasel thing that was really in terms of obviously the situation was rather bad but there's some unique things about the 5-Ox case so what happened was originally we had a very liberal trademark license and we thought we were alright and then that trademark was transferred to an organization which was more for the suits and liars and that's more rare a case particularly that they owned by some organization and then it gets transferred to something less than I there was the MIT X thing but I don't think we need to worry about that but also it was a very high invisible fact and within the free software world I don't think it did certainly there were lots of people who thought that that was definitely being awkward again well I think that sort of attitude persists actually even to this day that we were seen to be sort of the villain or the crazy people asking so much for from this wonderful program that everyone loves and there was a lot of people really liked the logo there was a lot of visceral life you do touch it I hate you now you should speak to people like you don't care about all this weird political shit but if you talk to them about stuff like the GFEL problem they say what was that anyway and they don't start out thinking one side of the other was right and some of them they've got some BST developers but I think it's much less one sided than you might think I'm sure that the unwashed masses they've been evil and awkward but they've always been evil and awkward in that sense and really it's those unwashed masses we're trying to protect and we'll just carry on doing what we think is right for them and they can go home I mean that's certainly one point of view but I don't think we want unwashed masses everywhere I think we want to get unwashed masses to come to us the only answer to that is if you want them to you know where to find them to be honest and you know I say that with my deviant hat thoroughly plastered on my hair if you could stand not following the DFSG you just give away from what there is and it's all branded so I'm not saying anything about going away from the DFSG I'm saying in the case where we have to do this sort of forking I guess I'm saying we need to it sounds horrible but advertise or to promote the fact that to come off looking less like the bad guy which I think we came off the last time looking kind of like the bad guy even though I don't feel like it works the impression was not that much of a bad guy but of an extremist of taking everything later that's right and that's a compliment in the end so interestingly I spoke to some Mozilla people about this and there I was with my Ubuntu Firefox maintainer hat on talking to these Mozilla guys who basically suits Mozilla and they thought that the real problem was that you, particularly you who had some kind of interpersonal like kind of spank, they thought that what was needed was you then to sit down in a pub and have a couple of beers and then you know meet each other and it would be fun and they just really didn't get the problem at all and you could read this mailing I read the mailing this message where it was they posted this one message where they said no no we need these things and they're not, you know I'm sure we talk about it but really we need these things and you and I think also Russell Nelson or somebody followed up and said well this is just impossible we cannot we cannot go there and that's just not possible for us and they, the idea that something is actually possible for somebody doesn't exist in their minds, they think that there's always some kind of you know good profile or something right and Debian is very inflexible right, most of the time we get everything away and we say yes go ahead do whatever you like, if you come to Debian and say we want to do something you don't currently permit Debian usually says nothing and the reason for that is that we've already decided to permit explicitly permit all of the things that we think are a good thing yeah and anything that we think is about, we're not permitted we're already something we think is is improper it's true it's very true and I think I've we should be able to do that but I think yeah, I what you should have done is you should have written one of those articles like the like Debian Legal did the GFDL thing you should have written a kind of this and that and just explain more clearly and posted it to you can have it posted to Debian the thing is in the end that the GFDL thing was needed because it was such a long argument, I mean the Firefox was not minor but I think it's not worth that much time to explain and explain the thing is that there's all these people they really don't understand why Debian has fallen down I mean the games team we're probably having lots of problems with Drillmax because some games, for example right now we have in the repositories we have Super Mario that uses Mario characters in Mario's world and also some games out there use the environment or characters of Star Trek and at some point we'll have to fork or replace all that stuff so for us it's gonna become a really big problem we're probably facing that with the help of our games and so on so I'm really interested in the social for this it would be great to come up with I guess guidelines as much as possible what we should be doing and try not to look like we're being unreasonable or unflexible especially when we're facing an organization that's really popular or considered very reputable like the Free Software Foundation to go against them to go against them to proceed even if the facts are there the initial reaction is like I think we should be less worried about that much, right? who else could have faced down the Free Software Foundation and got what they wanted it's just our moral authority is pretty much compatible and we should just we should explain why we're doing what we're doing and we shouldn't worry too much that people will think of us an example that I posted in the mailing list the unwashed masses are thinking we are evil strangers we're not giving them Microsoft Office we are evil, yeah some things you can't do I agree that we're never going to win everyone I think we should try as hard as we can to appeal to people and to get them to understand our point of view and to come on board with us because we want to keep growing as a project we definitely need more we want to be more people it's still a threat for the Free Software Foundation in general so anyway so here right now in many cases and similar to this one it's to say follow the same path you described before like ignoring the problem and it is enforced I think probably, I mean that's the best technique to go because again I think most Free Software developers and people are happy with us and we're not like we're not doing crazy things to their packages in general the Apache Foundation are not even threatening to zoo our downstrikes so that's okay if the Apache Foundation start looking at their train of life and say actually, then we'll go please don't maybe do free name Apache and this time they'll know we're not bluffing it's true I think you might have thought we were bluffing and probably facing that they were in a group and the games seem quite often so I mean I have to find a solution to that I think the game is going to be really tough and you might end up renaming a lot of them and I'm sorry about that but it's really those games companies, they're not Free Software companies yeah I mean I have to yeah of course some companies for example we have some ring base of all games that are not being enforced like for example the Three Lights of Glory or things like that that are the 80s games something like that probably some other characters like for example Mario for example Mickey Mouse we probably won't ever be able to put them in the game because of course Disney is quite picky about that but I mean I don't think we can go to any extreme because otherwise we wouldn't even have it's a game and when you see obvious things like they're using Mickey Mouse and you know that a lot of these corporations are very strongly going to come after people who do this to get a new sort of visibility you should try to work with upstream as much as possible to sort of explain look you're just working in a game that has this character this could be troublesome for you and for me and for anyone who wants to use your game yeah because it's super quite different when we package something that's trademark of our upstream and it's very different when we package something that say that the upstream also is not a holder of the trademark yeah I know but I mean most of the I mean some of of the companies of the games company are quite clear I mean we shouldn't package Mario or shouldn't package Mickey Mouse but some of our staff is not really that clear because it's not being enforced so because I mean you never know which company has followed the assets of the company that's going to be if it's not being enforced and we can show we've been distributing this game for 5 years then we will be able to win in court yeah because they've been able to enforce it so it's actually a good if it's not being enforced trademark is often a bad thing you know I think there's a project you know sometimes there are things that we might want to impose and if it's getting in the way and nobody's enforcing it it's definitely the best it has to be doing so if you complain this weekend and possibly don't sign an email to we're a brother exactly do all the problem yeah no more and not sending an email to Mr. Disney like what it's one answer thanks very much everybody thank you