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

[Steve Langasek]

On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 09:48:07AM +0200, Mike Hommey wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 11:52:33PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > 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

> > 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".

> Fair use of a trademark is not what debian does when it distributes the
> xen hypervisor. If that was true for xen, it would also be for firefox, and
> we wouldn't have to call it iceweasel.

In the case of firefox, we're not distributing code identical to something
that's been made available upstream under the name "firefox", we are
patching the code with patches that have not been approved by upstream.  If
we were distributing a package that directly corresponded to upstream code
(even to an arbitrary CVS tag/revision), I would argue that we wouldn't
*need* a trademark license from MoFo to distribute it under that name.

If we're patching the xen hypervisor, then yes, we're again distributing
something that is a derived work of xen rather than xen itself, so there's
legitimate cause for concern that this is a trademark infringement.  OTOH,
I'm still not convinced that package names which coincide with trademarked
names fall under the purview of trademark law at all, even when use of the
marks in documentation and interfaces may.  This applies equally to the
firefox and xen cases.

If the maintainers or ftpmasters are not comfortable that package names are
safe from claims of trademark infringement by upstreams, then I think we
should bring the question to SPI's counsel.

Cheers,
-- 
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/