Comment 525 for bug 269656

> 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...

Yes, I do understand trademarks. The same thing is said for copyright, patents, and even technical restriction management: it protects property. But it does by severely restricting freedom.

> 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.

That's not trademark infringement, but libel or slander.

> 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.'

That's perfectly fine. If there were no trademarks, Ubuntu's version of Firefox could be shipped with an about window that says there were some modifications for integration and security.

> 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?

If it was done with the purpose of defamation, then it could be prosecuted. Otherwise, there is no problem, because you don't do such things. These are extreme cases which don't happen in reality.

> 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?

Take a look around. There are tons of Linux distributions. Most of the names are not covered by trademarks. Still, there are as many names as there are distributions. Insane?

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

Nope, I don't see it. Trademark still restricts free software.

> 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.

Why do you think Ubuntu is not called "Ubuntu Linux"? The trademark has been removed from the name.