Hello,

My name is Will and I am working on a project aimed to help promote Debian
on the desktop. We've been pretty quiet about the project, so our presence
isn't really known on the internet yet. We will probably fly under the radar
until later this year. Even then, who really knows. Our target go live at
this point is 6/2008, but we may go sooner based on the outcome of some
final testing.

The reason I am contacting you is that I need to decide between two names,
and two logos. One set of name/logo are mine. The other set are yours. If I
were to go the latter route, I would be using the Debian swirl for the logo
and the word "debi" in the name. I won't do either of those without the
blessing of the Debian project and am willing to modify my project plans to
an extent if you think we can negotiate. You may be asking "why not just use
your own name/logo?". Well, this really isn't a true "distribution". It's
just a slightly customized Debian install and we want people to know that.

The main project goals are:

(CC'ed since I'm not sure if you are a list subscriber)

On 04/14/2008 06:20 PM, Will Kaiser wrote:

Michael already pointed you to the Debian Open Use Logo License. You
cannot use the logo this way.
Additionally, "Debian" is a trademark. You can see the Trademark
Licensing Policy on http://www.debian.org/trademark.
The application of the law is subjective, and I'm not a lawyer, but for
example Microsoft sued Linspire, Inc for using "Lindows". Of course,
they lost pitifully and SPI has less money to waste than Microsoft, but
on the other hand "Debian" is not a common noun and your project changes
the end of the string rather than the start. So I guess you cannot use
more than the first 4 letters, and I don't know if you can use that much.

Yeah, I had actually already looked into the Debian Live CD project.
Unfortunately there is no product available for download at this time that I
can line up with my images for comparison. So, we really have no idea what's
included on those images. They only have Etch images available (at least
last I checked) and we're working with Lenny and Sid.

I'm also pretty sure our goals are aligned a bit differently. The marketing
on the Debian Live CD website doesn't spell out that they are targeting
Desktop Linux or use as an alternative to derivatives such as Ubuntu and
friends. We also use a cool but non-standard apt configuration. Mainly
though, it's the marketing on the live cd project that won't work with our
primary goal. To appeal to (non-techie) Ubuntu users, you pretty much need
to use puppets and pictures to explain what your distro can do.

Thanks for your input. I think our name will be fine if I go with the
alternate choice anyway and still clearly identify our loyalty to the Debian
core. That's the main point of this anyway. We're not trying to start any
fires... just asking questions while trying to support something we love.

Thanks!

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 4:54 PM, Michael Shuler pbandjelly.org>
wrote:

On lun, 2008-04-14 at 21:44 -0700, Will Kaiser wrote:

The debian-live goal is not to have already-generated images, but to
give people (including you and your project) a way to generate custom
images really fast.

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 04:20:33PM -0700, Will Kaiser wrote:

I think they're too similiar. Someone has already pointed out the URLs
for the logo and trademark sites.

To me you have two problems with using debi and the swirl logo. The
first is yes you may run foul of the law doing this. What SPI would do
is, probably at this point, theoretical but there is certainly a chance
of trouble.

On 14/04/08 at 18:54 -0500, Michael Shuler wrote:

Lucas Nussbaum wrote:

as you know, debian testing and unstable are in flux and depends heavily
on the maintainers ability to fix core packages for debian-live (e.g.
kernel-modules). if those are broken, debian-live is broken.

see ml; images are back on live.d.n, whereas *-builds/ are autobuilds
and release/ are manually tested images (though release is currently
rsyncing in).

On 15/04/08 at 10:51 +0200, Daniel Baumann wrote:

Will Kaiser dijo [Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 09:44:05PM -0700]:

Umh... I know this will sound quite boring to you - But I (and I
guess, many of the Debian people) do not like the idea of presenting
testing/unstable snapshots as something ready for the end-user to
install. Hey, if they want unstable software, why not try
Ubuntu?

I understand you have your own motivations, and I know our testing is
more workable and more stable than many official distributions... But
anyway, Debian releases _are_ stable, and presenting Debiwhatever as a
testing snapshot won't do much good to Debian's reputation - known for
being anal about stability.