[gNewSense-users] Trademarks In gNewSense and the status of the CDDL License

[Kevin Dean]

I've been bouncing e-mails back and forth between Joerg Shilling
pertaining to the cdrecord issues that have been raised several times.

Essentially, we've worked the issue down as far as we can go and I
think we both clearly understand each other.

I'm at a point now where before I can decide to take any action on the
cdrtools bugs, I need to find out the official stance of gNewSense on
trademarks.

Mozilla used their trademark to prevent the proliferation of altered
versions of their browser called Firefox and using the Firefox logo.
Our responce to this issue was to re-brand the browser as BurningDog.

I have to now question if that was the best move. Why?

A user can not download the BurningDog source, rebrand it as Firefox
and distribute it. In this case, users who download the BurningDog
source are AS restricted from distributing it under the name "Firefox"
as we were. This isn't a license issue exactly, it's a trademark
issue.

Both Debian's DFSG and the Free Software Foundation approve the CDDL
as a Free Software license but gNewSense has not addressed this
license.

If gNewSense accepts this license then it means by upgrading cdrtools
we can close a bug - newer versions of cdrtools have moved to a CDDL
license solving the issue with the build system and the CDDL
specifically grants authors the right to require modified versions not
use any trademarks.