Re: [Evolution-hackers] branding

[William Jon McCann <mccannwj pha jhu edu>]

Hi Dan,

Dan Winship wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-03-31 at 16:17, William Jon McCann wrote:
>
> > The bigger issue, in my opinion, is the use of Ximian, Novell, or other 
> > corporate branding.  I don't think GNOME is the right place for such 
> > marketing.  I don't think we want to see RedHat, Sun, IBM, Netscape, 
> > etc. logos either.
>
> Well, think about the flip side. Would you want Red Hat, Sun, and IBM to
> ship the GNOME desktop with all of the GNOME branding removed?

That is completely within their rights.  As long as they provide the 
source for the changes.  In fact that is the way it should work.  GNOME 
should be the vendor-corporate-agnostic / unencumbered core.  Build your 
business model from it, not in it.  This is pretty close to what Sun is 
doing now.

As long as I can build from CVS and be free.

> Even ignoring the issue of proper attribution of work, if you remove all
> the branding from everything, you'd end up with a really dull system. No
> one's going to get excited about running "Web Browser for Desktop" on
> "Operating System" (on their generic beige PC).

This has nothing to do with attribution / credit.  The copyright 
wouldn't change.  Nor would the contributer list.

Once again, I am not advocating changing the name Evolution at all. 
This is about *corporate* branding.  Corporate branding should be done 
outside of GNOME proper.

I don't think changing "Ximian Evolution" to "Evolution" within the 
application makes for a dull system.

I think there is plenty to be excited about *in* Evolution and with how 
it can seamlessly integrate with GNOME.  That is how we can and should 
excite people.  This is something that everyone on this list should be 
very proud of.

> (The ad for Connector in the Evolution help files is a completely
> different thing though.)
>
> > I'm not even sure it is legal to distribute and use Ximian / Novell 
> > logos and trademarks.
>
> Somewhere there's a license file that explains that you can distribute
> the logos unmodified, or replace them with other images, but not
> distribute modified versions of them. I think.

Ok, thanks.  That's good news for the Evolution logo.

I'm not familiar with all the details but I think that the integration 
of Nautilus with GNOME may serve as a precedent for this type of 
de-branding.

I propose:

Evolution        == default GNOME Evolution
Ximian Evolution == Evolution shipped by Ximian/Novell

The later may differ from the former in that it may include vendor 
add-ons, additional XD integration work, etc.


Cheers,
Jon