On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The notion that trade marked logos are problematic is
true for a specific
strict understanding of the GPL license as is prevalent under people who
adhere to the Debian way of thinking. It is definetly not universally shared
and it is a travesty that brought us Iceweasel.
The Iceweasel question is "Does it violate the definition of free
software to permit logos released under licenses permitting only
restricted distribution?" Most people other than Debian would say no,
because 1) they're a tiny part of the software and easily removed, and
2) they're trademarked, so you couldn't use them for much even if they
weren't copyrighted. Wikimedia's logos (well, except the MediaWiki
one) are copyrighted with all rights reserved, so probably Wikimedia
disagrees with Debian on this.
The question that I asked, though, was "Do we want to use or
distributed copyrighted/trademarked logos *without* *any* *permission*
from the rights-holder?" We are *not* talking about a case where the
logo is licensed for people to use only restrictively. We're talking
about a case where the logo is not licensed at *all*. You can't just
go ahead and take a major corporation's logo and incorporate it into
your software without permission. Whether you use the GPL, BSD, MIT,
proprietary licenses, or whatever, that's just illegal, or at least
possibly so.