Hi, We've had a number of contacts in recent months asking about the possibility to make GNOME t-shirts for commercial resale, and we've been stuck for a contract that we can get people to sign which formulates a number of basic requirements of a commercial trademark agreement - namely: - Quality control - Defense against abuse - Licensing fees We were working on an agreemetn for an official GNOME store last year which fell through at the last minute, and during that process we came up with a contract which has gone through a few iterations with both German and US lawyers, so it should hold up pretty well. It's worth noting that the contract is for commercial exploitation of the GNOME trademark. We will need some other kind of contract if we decide to push usage of the trademark in, say distros. And for the moment, we're not at that stage. This is a contract we will be asking companies making GNOME merchandise to sign (or at least use as a starting point for discussions). The key points of the contract for me are: - The foundation has a quality control veto over the merchandise - The foundation gets a discount on the sale price of the items for its own use (resale, promotion) - The foundation gets a cut of the proceeds of sales (a percentage - typically for merchandising agreements, the percentage is between 10 and 20 percent of gross (that is, for a t-shirt selling at ?15, between ?1.50 and ?3.00) - The foundation has some way of verifying how much we're owed, and terminating trademark agreements in the event of defaulting on payments Can I get comments and feedback on this? Are there clauses in there that we should consider removing because they're too draconian? Or are there other things that we have forgotten? Since lawyers talk .doc, and use revision control to track changes to the documents, that's what we ge too. Works great in Abiword. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary Lyon, France
Attachment:
GNOME_-_vendor_contract.doc
Description: MS-Word document