Re: gnome-logos package

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 12/17/05, Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman sun com> wrote:
> Hi Luis:
>
> IMO there may be yet another option, i.e. the 'Debian' route, where we
> have one logo package (the default?) that's not trademarked (though IMO
> the 'GNOME' name should remain trademarked), and one, downloadable from
> gnome.org, which is trademarked and therefore (perhaps ironically) not
> part of the "community" packages.
>
> Whether this is desirable probably depends on who you ask, but at least
> it would have the opt in/opt out approach; users and distros could vote
> with their, uh, well you know what I mean...

I believe I suggested this in my paper, though I forgot about it this
morning. I believe Debian is not substantially pleased with this
approach ATM, though I forget why- any debianites care to
elaborate/correct me?

Luis

> Luis Villa wrote:
>
> >
> >Trademark law doesn't give us the flexibility we want, which leaves us
> >with options (as I see it) that are basically:
> >
> >* pursue the Mozilla route (strong trademark), which I feel will
> >alienate our contributors and completely violate the implied social
> >contract which the GPL has created around our shared community goods
> >(i.e., compare/contrast how we license our code and the foot- which
> >should be more important? why would we choose to license one more
> >liberally than the other?)
> >
> >* collaborate with our lawyers to create and pursue a completely
> >novel/untested/potentially completely undefensible license that uses a
> >novel legal approach to give the community flexible rights without (I
> >have approached one other free software group about collaborating
> >along these lines but it hasn't really gone anywhere, unfortunately)
> >
> >* give up the legally enforceable mark and use a political party
> >approach- accept that there will be some uses we don't like and can't
> >control, but use the mechanisms of party (speech, platform creation,
> >etc.) to control the mark as much as possible outside of traditional
> >trademark law.
> >
> >HTH-
> >Luis
> >
>
>