On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@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.