Comment 524 for bug 269656

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:46:03 -0000
Remco <email address hidden> wrote:

> Trademark is, like copyright and patents, an "intellectual property",
> designed to restrict other people.

No, you don't understand trademarks. Trademarks are designed to watch
out for your property, where 'you' can be whatever you want; community,
open source software, a person...

Let me put it this way. If you write a poem and put your signature on
it, and make sure that everybody can see it and even base their work on
it, copy it and share it, would you accept that each derivation of that
poem is yours? If you put your signature on 'Roses are red' and someone
else modifies it into (lets be as bad as we can) 'Nazis are good',
would you be ok with your signature under that poem? I wouldn't.

GPL it self says that if you modify a software, you should add at least
add notice that this is not original software:

'If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we
want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so
that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original
authors' reputations.'

Now, if there wouldn't be trademarks on software, what would stop you
from calling Epiphany based on WebKit - a Firefox? Or, Windows Vista -
latest Slackware?

> By the way, these restrictions actually encourage cloning. Had there
> been no copyright on UNIX, there would have been no 10 different
> versions of it, including GNU.

Had there been no trademarks and no source of UNIX, we would still have
tons of different UNIX like operating systems. What's even worse,
they all might have exactly the same name, but the application X
wouldn't run on them all, even tough they are all SuperUNIX. This
doesn't look like sane environment to me. How about you?

You see how trademarks and open source don't have anything in common?
They are unrelated.

> The same is true for the Firefox code. If we use the nameless version
> and build our own brand, we use free software. If we use Firefox®, we
> aren't using free software, since the license of the branded binary is
> non-free.

There is no license on Firefox binary. There's license on Firefox
source code and there is a Firefox trademark.

> However, Firefox® must be included in a distribution. This means the
> distribution will always fall under the trademark of Mozilla. This can
> only be solved by removing the trademarked parts.

If we would start removing trademarks from Ubuntu, we would have to
remove... Almost all software in it, including linux kernel. Cause,
Linux is a trademark. Bottom line, we wouldn't have operating system.