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Comment by dismalaf | Hacker News Reader

> Given that OBS is GPL licensed, any legal action would have to be trademark-based, right?

Yup. The issue isn't the code but misrepresentation of the origin. It's like back in the day when Debian "forked" Firefox for reasons...

Edit - worded it poorly - never meant to imply Debian did anything wrong, only that they changed the branding to respect Firefox's trademark and avoid the situation that OBS is threatening Fedora with.

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That's sort of the difference, isn't it? Debian forked Firefox and changed the code, so they had to rename it. But this doesn't look like changing the code, it's building it with different versions of its dependencies / different wrapping around it. Maybe there's a case here, but it feels pretty tenuous.

> Debian forked Firefox and changed the code

Debian didn't actually change the code, but they consider the right to change the code important, and don't accept Debian-specific exceptions.

That's "changing the code."

The main issue that I see, is that OBS doesn't want to be held responsible for the Fedora version, which is different from the "officially-supported" OBS version. They didn't modify anything other than the build, to exclude certain dependencies.

But modifying the build, is modifying the code. They are allowed to do that, but they probably aren't allowed to slap the OBS name on the result.

> But modifying the build, is modifying the code.

Is it? Across Ubuntu, RHEL, and Archlinux, basically every package is being built against different versions of its underlying dependencies, and is being patched as needed to work with those distros. Trademarks weaken with lax enforcement, so you'd think if that interpretation held it would be amazingly dangerous for any trademark holder whose software was being packaged for Linux distros.

Maybe, but IANAL. Many build pipelines are almost as complex as the code they weave together.

I think the specific argument being made here, is that the technical details of how Fedora implements this mean that people who do not read carefully and click a checkbox may attempt to install the official flatpak version and get Fedora's rebuild of it instead, with no obvious cue that they did so, other than the bugs that they then go report, not understanding the internals of Fedora's opinions on flatpaks.

I suppose the closest analogy I can imagine from non-malicious(arguably) history would be software hosting sites that would repackage installers with their own adware or toolbar or whatever "value add".

I think it is possible that OBS could make that nuanced argument in court: that what Fedora is doing here confuses consumers specifically because of how they stack multiple default repos and override the 1st party package. But it would hinge on whether consumers are confused about the product they're getting, and I think that's unlikely to succeed. Notably, I think the fact that users are going to the OBS project to report bugs is more likely to work against their case than for it, because it shows that consumers do accurately realize that the OBS Project owns OBS, not Fedora.

Trademark isn't only about the ownership of the brand. Its about who can use the brand on what.

By using the brand on something else, the reputation can be damaged

Is somebody using the brand on something that isn't OBS?

https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mozillateam/firefox/firefox.ja... is the config for what becomes Ubuntu's firefox package

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/fi... is the equivalent for Arch

Both apply different configurations, use different versions of dependencies, and in Arch's case applies a patch to the upstream code.

Which of them isn't Firefox?

I worked for a company that sold high-end imaging equipment.

They had distribution networks, authorized to carry their brand.

But there were also “gray market” distributors, that would do things like resell foreign market gear, or devices that were separated from sales promotion bundles.

These were our brand, but the company would not support them. No hardware fixes (unless paid), no firmware upgrades, and no marketing support.

Often, the savings were minimal. It was expensive gear; even at a discount.

whichever one(s) the owner of the name "firefox" allows to be called firefox. Open source code does not automatically mean you get to use the name of the project in your redistribution of it.

> They didn't modify anything other than the build, to exclude certain dependencies.

To be clear here: They do modify it further than that by applying a number of patches.

For example, they replace libx264 with OpenH264 which also requires some changes to the UI code since it is (unfortunately) hardcoded to expect x264 to exist. While there have been efforts to upstream those changes, they have not yet been merged.

Thanks for that.

It seems (to me) to make sense, for OBS to want their name off of it.

Oh it's a way different situation (Debian followed every letter of both the license and trademark law), but is an example that most FOSS people remember of a trademark issue related to a distro packaging an OSS project and needing to change the branding.

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