Re: GNOME Logo Licensing

[Simon McVittie <simon mcvittie collabora co uk>]

On Sun, 12 Mar 2017 at 00:52:25 +0000, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> There has been many instances of us protecting our brand by asking people to
> stop using our logo for commercial purposes, CC-BY-SA/LGPLv3 does grant
> precisely the right to use it commercially.

There are two things a third party needs to do to use the GNOME name
and logo legally:

* Not infringe trademarks: they need to be either using them in a
  way that is not protected by trademark law (for instance writing a
  Wikipedia page about GNOME, or describing MATE/Cinnamon/etc. as
  being based on GNOME), or using it in a way for which GNOME
  specifically gives permission.

* Not infringe copyright: for the logo specifically, they need to be
  allowed to copy it without infringing the copyright held by whoever
  designed/made the logo. The GNOME *name* is far too short to be
  protected by copyright, so this doesn't apply; so GNOME needs
  (and has) a trademark policy covering at least the name, regardless
  of what is done about the logo.

Briefly, copyright is about an author's right to control copying of
their work (and potentially make money by selling permission to
copy it). Trademarks are about a vendor's right to not have their
reputation damaged by applying their name, logo, or other things
that are recognised by consumers to an inferior product.

Open source software is unusual because the inferior product is
often a modified version of the "real" product, rather than a
reimplementation (for instance Mozilla has had a lot of trouble with
third parties offering modified versions of Firefox that bundle
or contain malware, but I'm not aware of anyone publishing things
that were not based on Firefox at all and calling *those* Firefox);
but trademarks, not copyright, are the right weapon against that.

I think what you need here is a trademark license that forbids what
you want to forbid, in particular using the GNOME name or the GNOME
logo to identify things that are not GNOME.
<https://www.gnome.org/foundation/legal-and-trademarks/> already
provides this.

(Ab)using copyright licenses to do the job of trademarks typically
leads to using copyright licenses that certainly don't meet the
Open Source Definition (or similar definitions like the FSF's
Free Software Definition and Debian's Debian Free Software
Guidelines), and in many cases forbid perfectly reasonable forms
of distribution altogether. This is how we got into the silly
Firefox/Iceweasel situation, which has only recently been resolved
(Mozilla's logos are now covered by a permissive copyright license
but a much more restrictive trademark license).

    S