[Pkg-xen-devel] Re: Xen is affected by the trademark desease

[Steve Langasek]

On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 09:14:29PM +0200, Bastian Blank wrote:

> XenSource published a trademark policy[1]. I don't think we will be able
> to follow it if we want to support installation of different versions at
> the same time.

> [1]: http://www.xensource.com/company/legal.html

>From this page:

  Fair Use of Marks

  Nominative fair use is a common law principle that permits referential use
  of someone else's mark to describe that other person's goods or services
  under certain limited circumstances. For example, you may use a competitor's
  trademark when comparing your products with your competitor's products.
  Generally speaking, you may make fair use of another person's trademark only
  when you comply with nominative fair use conditions, which include ensuring
  that: (a) the other person's product or service is not readily identifiable
  without use of their trademark; (b) you make use of only so much of the
  other person's mark as is reasonably necessary to identify the product or
  services; and (c) your use of the mark does nothing that suggests
  sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark holder, and your conduct and
  language reflect the true and accurate relationship between your products
  and the other person's products.

It is under the principle of nominative fair use that Debian uses any
trademarks of our upstreams as package names for software they distribute.

As such, we don't necessarily have any obligation to acquire a trademark
license from XenSource to name our packages "xen", AFAICS.

We certainly aren't distributing a product named "Xen", we're distributing
one named "Debian".

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon at debian.org                                   http://www.debian.org/