Re: gnome-logos package

[Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>]

On Sad, 2005-12-17 at 11:32 -0500, Luis Villa wrote:
> IANAL (yet), but... under US trademark law (and most European
> trademark law, as I understand it) basically all users of the mark
> must ask us for permission before use. We cannot adopt a permission
> scheme which allows any use of the logo which might be confusing to
> consumers without our permission. So this basically rules out any sane
> community-oriented permissioning scheme. I go into that in some more
> detail in the paper i linked in the blog post, if you have more time
> to read it.

Other people have successfully dealt with granting of blanket
permissions. Fedora for example allows anyone to make 'Fedora' CDs under
a blanket agreement that requires the CD be a true copy and any media be
warranted.

It gets truely horrible once you want flexibility because the role of a
trademark is to define what something is and if it can be anything then
it is meaningless. The gnome trademark policy attempts so far have been
utterly farcical however.

It ought to be possible to find a way to license a mark or form of the
mark that can be sensibly used. Again that has been done by companies
before (one 1990's example of direct relevance was the Novell 'yes it
works with Netware' program). Having a logo for a program which is a
"gnome program" and for "gnome developer" ought to be doable given the
right definition, and "foundation member" is definitely one that can be
done today as the foundation has a defined membership.

Alan