On Fri, Jun 06, 2014 at 02:29:50PM -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
On 06/06/2014 01:26 PM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> On 06/06/2014 01:18 PM, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
>> On Fri, 2014-06-06 at 12:33 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
>>> It might run afoul of the Firefox trademark thing. A rebranded
>>> "IceWeasle GNOME" loses all the brand recognition.
>
>> I know we are not allowed to apply unauthorized patches. I didn't
>> realize extensions might also be impermissible. If so, that
>> would be a strong argument against Firefox.
>
> We should invoke the lawyers here, but I doubt that this would be
> impermissible. I suspect that Firefox implicitly allows this simply
> by offering a public extension interface and a freely-available
> mechanism to apply them.
It was pointed out to me off-list that Mozilla does in fact have
trademark restrictions on shipping plugins, extensions and themes by
default:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/policy/ contains
the following phrasing:
"If you want to ship extensions, themes or plug-ins installed by
default or as part of the same installation process as the Mozilla
products (as opposed to, say, linked as XPIs from the default start
page), and you plan on distributing them under any Mozilla Marks, you
must first seek approval from us. What we find acceptable will depend
on the effect of the extensions, themes and plug-ins on the Mozilla
product. To give examples, changing the theme of one product to
another, equally high-quality and aesthetically pleasing theme would
be considered. A combination of ten different extensions with three
toolbars and seven context menu items probably wouldn't be."
So we might be able to ship with these extensions, but we would need
Mozilla's approval first.
Seriously, it's like they're going out of their way to discourage us
from using their product.
I wouldn't say that. It's relatively simple for themes and extensions
to render the final result ugly or unusable in a way that reflects
poorly on Mozilla/Firefox. We require people who recombine Fedora
with other software not to use our trademarks to refer to their
resulting effort. No difference here IMHO other than Mozilla trying
to acknowledge that some distributions might want to do exactly what
we're talking about, and they want to leave the door open.
--
Paul W. Frields
http://paul.frields.org/
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