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List:       kde-community
Subject:    Re: KDE Apps name trademarks
From:       Ben Cooksley <bcooksley () kde ! org>
Date:       2020-07-22 8:01:03
Message-ID: CA+XidOEvr5K3up08LSVAS92ZzdTpxgj7V4oCAz98=Cr-u82znQ () mail ! gmail ! com
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On Wed, Jul 22, 2020 at 7:16 AM Albert Vaca Cintora
<albertvaka@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> > But if there are situations where third parties are living off our good name,
> > we should fight this. We already have the rights to do so.
> 
> Should we? Isn't that the same that RedHat, SUSE, Canonical, etc. do? What's wrong \
> with charging for our apps as a distributor?

There isn't anything wrong with charging for our applications as a distributor.

The potential problem arises if they portray themselves as an
'official' version, which is a label only we can provide.
It is especially problematic if the binary they've packaged contains
malware or other alterations that have a negative impact on the user
experience, which users will attribute to us, not the distributor of
the software.

The situation with Redhat/SUSE/Canonical is also slightly different,
as we already have an established relationship with all three of
those. This includes them receiving early access to our releases along
with them being subscribed to our security pre-announce service.

In this case, the vendor in question has not made contact in any form with us.

> 
> We can, under the GPL, enforce that any fixes made to apps (eg: so they work better \
> on Windows) get back upstream, but that's it. 
> If our apps were trademarked, why is the person doing the Windows packages not \
> allowed to use the app name, but the person doing the Debian packages is? In what \
> they differ? Do we want to become IceWeasel? 
> I think we should be happy there are packagers that distribute our software on \
> Windows, the same way we are happy there are packages distributing our software on \
> Linux distros. 
> 

Cheers,
Ben


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