Re: GNOME Local user groups

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

Felipe Barros S. wrote:
> 	We[1] are an official GNOME Group[2], with almost five GNOME Foundation
> members, we promote, teach and evangelize in our country and I have some
> questions to do:

I'm curious what "almost 5 foundation members" means :)

> 1. We can use all the marketing stuff[3] like a official logos, posters,
> and other stuffs in our meetings or RFDG[4]?

Yes. have you signed the click-through GNOME user group trademark usage
agreement? http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/index.html

> 2. Now in November we have a meeting called "Día de GNOME"[5] as part of
> the "VII Encuentro Nacional de Linux" and we want to invite to some
> GNOME Hacker to talk with us. The GNOME Foundation could help us in some
> way?

This is trickier - the GNOME Foundation is everyone on this list.

Whether the board could help financially, or with contacts, is a
separate question - please contact board-list with a list of things you
hope we can help with.

If what you're looking for is some community members to help organise
the conference, invite people, or other things like that, then this list
is probably the best place to ask. What kind of help do you need?

> 3. To resolve in part the expenses of the meetings that we make. We can
> sell some stuffs like a stickers, mugs, pencils or whatever, using GNOME
> logos and fonts?

There are 3 answers to this, none is particularly satisfactory (IANAL,
this is my personal take, given the research I have had to do into the
issue, etc.):

1. In general, no. The foundation has a couple of agreements with
vendors selling GNOME merchandise (and more on the way). Selling GNOME
merchandise for-profit (even as a fundraiser) is explicitly forbidden in
the user group agreement I referred to earlier.

2. As a user group, this could be considered proper use of the
trademarks by members of the community (and thus agents of the
foundation). This is the way I see things, but the courts might not
agree, if we ever had a trademark case. A court case is highly unlikely,
though.

3. You're in Chile, and the GNOME Foundation has no claim to
jurisdiction there, so in some sense, you can do whatever you want and
there's nothing we can do about it.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
David Neary
bolsh gimp org