Re: GNOME Logo Licensing

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Mon, 2017-03-13 at 12:43 +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:
> 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).

That was what I would have said, if Simon didn't put it so eloquently.
So +1 for a permissive license for the artwork itself, we can control
its usage through the GNOME trademark.

Cheers