#369 Mozilla trademark guidelines
Closed None Opened 13 years ago by sundaram.

= Proposal topic =

To decide whether the current Mozilla trademark guidelines are acceptable from the Fedora perspective and to the solve the problem by discussing it with Mozilla to grant us more flexibility (Point of contact: Luis Villa) or rebrand the Mozilla packages (Firefox and Thunderbird)

= Overview =

Thunderbird is suffering from a crash for several weeks (not everyone is facing the issue) and unless upstream accepts the patch, we cannot push an update without rebranding the thunderbird package

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-April/135035.html

Thunderbird has other issues as outlined in the following and followups to it

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-April/135123.html

FESCo can either decide that the value of Mozilla branding is high and discuss it with Mozilla and get Fedora (and other distributions) more flexibility to patch issues (such as the crash and bundling of libraries) without losing the branding or decide that the the trademark guidelines are restrictive and rebrand it (following Debian). I am proposing that FESCo discuss and decide on the right solution to the current problem and the policy about such matters in general.

= Owners =

Rahul Sundaram


Added for 2010-04-27 meeting.

Also, adding cc for some of the thunderbird maintainers.

Personally, I think this has been an unfortunate miscommunication. Upstream didn't realize the reach of this bug. We need to work better to find a way to let upstream know when our users are hitting a serious bug and escalate it so it can get fixed.

Thank you Kevin, for cc'ing me. That was the first I'd heard about this issue. I have since responded[*] to the devel thread.

First, I agree that there was a miscommunication or two here, but it was not between Fedora and Mozilla. We ourselves misjudged the impact of the bug (perhaps in part due to the fact that IMAP server used by the maintainers on a regular basis is not affected by this issue?), and if we misjudge the impact, it's pretty hard to sound the alarm upstream.

Second, it was a miscommunication that trademark is the only reason here for denying patches. It is one reason, but as I explained[], we still would be particular about patches regardless of the agreement, so this situation would have come up anyway. In fact, we've been doing the same thing since before we had the agreement. Fedora as a project strongly believes in pushing patches upstream[*] and so do I. There are of course exceptions, and we just need to recognize them properly.

If anything, in the future feel free to appeal directly to me any patches for the Mozilla product set which you think have been improperly accepted or denied.

[] http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-April/135239.html
[
*] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/WhyUpstream

At the 2010-04-27 meeting we agreed to:

continue with current procedures. fesco encourages that a t-bird package with the IMAP patch get in testing ASAP. given the communication issues aroudn the priority/severity of the bug, we strongly encourage more people to become involved in triage and co-maintainership.

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