http://www.openoffice.org/about_us/summary.html

From the trademark section:

“OpenOffice.org” is trademarked and protected in the USA.

You also need to get permission to use their own logos/banners etc. Even just to link to them from your blog with those images!

http://www.apache.org/foundation/licence-FAQ.html#Marks

‘Apache’, ‘Apache Software Foundation’, the multicoloured feather, and the various Apache project names and logos are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation, and are usable by others only with express permission from the ASF.

http://www.linuxmark.org/

Set up expressing to handle licensing the use of the Linux trademark owned by Linus Torvalds. If you want to trademark “Red Hat Linux” you need to license the Linux trademark through LMI.

That’s not technically distribution per the MPL because we are redistributing it to other employees within our company. It is perfectly legitimate for a company to customize Firefox and distribute it to their employees.

The issue here is broad distribution.

Check: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6594

Part of the idea (from what I remember) of not allowing others to have custom browsers that carry the Firefox name is so that they won’t modify the core or include extensions that make the browser crap and thereby besmirch the Firefox name.
All the addons at AMO that are available to the public have been through a review process and the fact that we’re providing them through our own secure site (integrated with our addons browser) we’re giving them some seal of approval.
If we wanted to, I suppose we could invent another “gold star” seal of approval that keeps to even higher standards. But the point is that we could make the approval process easy on ourselves and still ensure relative non-suckiness of branded browsers with these few simple rules.

Maybe, but it’s standard practice. Things could be worse — my wife worked for a Pittsburgh company called “Compunetix”, which had a sibling company called “Compunetics” .

Something no-one raised is the need for Mozilla to be able to shut down sites distributing Trojaned Firefox builds. I don’t see how they can do that if they give up trademark protection for Firefox.

Seems to me that the best thing Mozilla can do is strengthen the Mozilla brand.

Rob

What nonsense. I’m totally with you, Mike.

From http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/policy.html :

Those taking full advantage of the open-source nature of Mozilla’s products and making significant functional changes may not redistribute the fruits of their labor under any Mozilla trademark. For example, it would be inappropriate for them to say “based on Mozilla Firefox”. Instead, in the interest of complete accuracy, they should describe their executables as “based on Mozilla technology”, or “incorporating Mozilla source code.”

Joe User doesn’t know anything about the foundation that writes the webserver and other middleware that lets him get to his favourite website. While it is true that the general population is still confused and still enter http:// addresses into the Google search box, Joe User still has a heck of a lot better chance of knowing (and caring) about who makes the software he just launched to get to his favourite website. Making the connection between “Mozilla” and the “Mozilla Foundation” is indeed a stretch, but I’d think it’s more likely than him making the Apache connection.

Of course Flock gets crazy amounts of goodness from mentioning both Mozilla _and_ Firefox. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t. I know lots of Mozilla folks mutter obscenities under their breath whenever they read on TechCrunch “Flock, the social web browser based on Firefox”, but it does put “Firefox” in “print” one more time, and continues to burn that wordmark into people’s brand consciousness. Flock undoubtedly gets more out of being associated with Firefox than the reverse, but as long as Flock isn’t known as something bad like “the spyware browser” the reverse association _is_ good for Firefox.

Also, I believe you _can_ say “based on the same code as Firefox”. Flock does this today. You just can’t say “Flock Firefox” or something similarly goofy and misleading. You can’t use their trademark as part of your own. IANAL though, so maybe I’m wrong here.

Again, I am _not_ speaking for or on behalf of Flock, and I don’t always agree with what they do. They just pay my salary and I still get to work on Mozilla stuff.

@raccettura:
Unfortunately you can’t realistically monetize an extension as a product (yet). If I made an innovative and popular extension (think say, Firebug), but in order to pay the salaries of the devs who wrote it, the extension also changed the Google affiliate code in the search box, I suspect it wouldn’t be looked upon too kindly. If someone comes up with a good business model for extensions, I’d love to hear it.

I assume you are referring to Netscape.

Netscape chose to “over customize” the browser. If they had just created a set of customizations on top of Firefox and not tried so hard to be a completely different browser, they might have succeeded. Especially if real Firefox code was what got updated behind the scenes.

Anytime you set yourself up where you have to go through a lot of effort to compile your own browser, set up your own update servers, etc., you’re never going to be current.

And I agree with sticking to extensions/themes to update the browser.