“Trademarks have recently become something of an issue in
open-source circles. Debian, for example, recently took exception
to Mozilla’s Firefox trademark rules and called its version of the
popular browser, IceWeasel. So, Ubuntu has decided to address
possible trademark issues by creating its own trademark policy.“Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical Ltd., the company behind
Ubuntu, announced the trademark policy in his blog on April 25.
Shuttleworth also explained why the Ubuntu leadership felt it had
to create such a policy. ‘Classically, ‘software freedom’ was about
the copyright license associated with the code. But patents and
trademarks are now being brought into the mix. For example, the
discussion around Mozilla’s trademark policy was directly linking
the concept of ‘freedom’ to trademark policy as much as code
copyright license,’ Shuttleworth wrote…”