Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 4th Jan 2013 18:29 UTC

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Member since:
2005-07-12
Protection of trademarks is important even for companies that aren't trying to profit from OSS.
Mozilla reserves the rights associated with the Firefox brand, so Debian brands their browser Iceweasel so they can extend trademark rights to their users.
Even FreeBSD once had to shutdown a distributor who was pressing and selling his own FreeBSD disks. They rightly felt that since they didn't have any control in the process, and thus couldn't guarantee that they weren't defective or worse, the distributor shouldn't be use their branding. FreeBSD has a solid reputation, but the FreeBSD Foundation is a small organization, and damaging that reputation could harm them for years.