This begs the question: Will this desire for an agreed upon icon for RSS really make any difference to the user? I tend to doubt it.

Seems like I missed the storm in the teacup about Mozilla’s treatment of the RSS feed icon - Frank Hecker has cleared up Mozilla’s intentions, and how they plan to proceed.

As rows go, this one is a little particular. Mozilla wanted to encourage universal use of the orange feed icon for syndication in open formats. So far so good. One option that they were considering to accomplish that goal is copyrighting the icon, to avoid its use for things other than syndication using open formats.

Now, anyone who’s been involved in trademark discussions in the free software community knows how hard an issue this is. O’Reilly found that out recently, as have Mozilla in the past. You want to reconcile two fundamentally incompatible ideas:

1.

Allow the good guys to use and spread freely the mark and thus get the word out about your project
2.

Fulfill the requirements of trademark law by ensuring the quality of each use of the trademark

If you don’t police your mark, by verifying each use of the trademark and saying “I agree with this use of the mark” in some semi-formal way, you lose the protections which trademark law gives, and you don’t get to take bad guys who abuse the mark to court. If you do police your mark, then you are restraining the good guys from freely spreading the mark…. Source: Safe As Milk