Re: Minutes of the Board meeting 2006/Feb/15

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Ooops... that wasn't supposed to happen.

> Selon Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>:
> > On Mon, 2006-02-27 at 13:05, Luis Villa wrote:
...
> > > > http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/guidelines/
...
> > > This is one of the things I want to kill, FWIW.
> >
> > We can't have it both ways.  Either we keep the GNOME trademarks, which
> > requires us to enforce them, or we abandon them.

We can at least try to administer our trademarks in a way which is coherent with
a free software community. I'd like to see people playing with the marks,
remixing and hacking on them in a visual sense, producing t-shirts and posters
and car stickers and the like. The foundation should be the final arbiter of
what is acceptable and unacceptable, but the default should be "go for it".

The problem is that when you start talking about trademarks, there are so many
assumptions flying around that most people (even most lawyers) are just
repeating what they've heard elsewheer, and when talking about what you have to
do to protect a trademark, most people (including myself) are offering pure
supposition.

I think it'd be a good idea to get a proper legal opinion on defending our
marks, and setting up our trademark policy to be as liberal as possible without
losing them.

Cheers,
Dave.

--
Dave Neary
Lyon, France