Daniel Goldman: The Mozilla Foundation asked Opera to sign an agreement on the use of its RSS feed icon in the Opera browser.
Randy: Mozilla's trademark filing can be found here.
http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=78836825
This is very disturbing. The Mozilla foundation should have made their intentions known from the beginning. I'm not aware of the details of the agreement, but simply on the fact that Opera had to pull the icon from its browser is enough for me say the blogosphere must act now and boldly. You can read more on Michell Baker's blog in What do icons mean? (Part 1) and What do icons mean? (Part 2). A nice quote follows.
Michell Baker: Options 1 [cut] use an open source license. [cut] Option 2. The other extreme is a classic trademark licensing program. In this setting the Mozilla Foundation licenses the icon as a trademark to everyone on the same terms and has a formal process for managing the evolution and use of the mark.
But that's OK... I mean, no reason to let facts stand in the way of a good rant.