[Pkg-cups-devel] Trademark issues with renaming Debian's cupsys to cups?

[Martin Pitt]

Hi Mike,

I just got a request from Till Kamppeter [1] to rename the
Debian/Ubuntu "cupsys" package to "cups", so that existing
documentation ("install this package", "run /etc/init.d/cups", etc.),
and LSB printer driver packages would work, and future LSB
specification could even rely on package and init script names.

I wholeheartedly agree that it would be so much nicer to use the
standard upstream project name.

Jeff Licquia now pointed out why "cupsys" was introduced in the first
place [2] back in 1999: There were concerns that patches introduced in
Debian would violate the trademark "cups".

We still have some patches and always will have. Most of them fix
packaging issues, or are small additions which got refused upstream,
such as support for pid files. The only big change we have is the
backport of the pdftops filter from cups' 1.4 trunk. If you are
interested, I'm happy to give you a rundown of the current patches in
a followup email.

So I am interested whether the concern about trademark violation is
actually justified under these circumstances. Is there a more
detailled statement about this somewhere, or what is your current
opinion on this?

Thank you!

Martin

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/482296
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/1999/06/msg00182.html

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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