Comment 10 for bug 83118

Robert: There are plenty of other trademark policies for GPL software out there http://lwn.net/Articles/216049/ however most of the trademarks are not aggressively enforced. A notable exception is Red Hat - RHEL is GPLed, but Red Hat is a trademark, so people who exercise their GPL rights have to rename the result http://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/corp/RH-3573_284204_TM_Gd.pdf so we end up with CentOS.

A strict reading of many of the other policies would result in mass renaming of many packages, but (IANAL) trademarks are controlled by actual enforcement actions, not policies, so in practice this doesn't happen.

So there's lots of trademark policies out there, and trademark law is not incompatible with Free Software, but the actual enforcement varies a lot and there's not currently a standard trademark policy that allows use by the free software community but retains the right to smack down bad people (eg distributors of firefox with viruses). http://tieguy.org/blog/2005/09/16/fri-16-sep-2005/ http://tieguy.org/blog/index.php?s=trademark&paged=2 and we can but hope Luis will write the one true GPTML once he finishes his degree.

Back to the point, the difference between mysql-query-browser and firefox is that MySQL AB doesn't aggressively enforce its trademarks against distributions who ship versions of MySQL software. IANAL, but the lack of enforcement gives tacit approval of this use of the MySQL trademark by distributions, despite it not being permitted by the MySQL trademark policy.