[Pkg-xen-devel] Re: Xen is affected by the trademark desease

[Mike Hommey]

On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 11:52:33PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 09:14:29PM +0200, Bastian Blank wrote:
> 
> > XenSource published a trademark policy[1]. I don't think we will be able
> > to follow it if we want to support installation of different versions at
> > the same time.
> 
> > [1]: http://www.xensource.com/company/legal.html
> 
> It is under the principle of nominative fair use that Debian uses any
> trademarks of our upstreams as package names for software they distribute.
> 
> As such, we don't necessarily have any obligation to acquire a trademark
> license from XenSource to name our packages "xen", AFAICS.
> 
> We certainly aren't distributing a product named "Xen", we're distributing
> one named "Debian".

Fair use of a trademark is not what debian does when it distributes the
xen hypervisor. If that was true for xen, it would also be for firefox, and
we wouldn't have to call it iceweasel.

The appropriate paragraph is "Marketing & Distributing Software under
the Xen(tm) Trademark", and the associated FAQ, especially #5, #6, #16, #20.

Mike