Re: Agenda for board meeting on July 7th

[Magdalen Berns <m berns thismagpie com>]

The license we've chosen clearly allows people to sell products with the code included, so I'm assuming this is strictly a trademark issues. 

Jeff initially raised some concern about whether source code was being included as they don't seem to indicate either way.

  

As far as I can tell this is about figuring out if this is a scam (which could hurt the GNOME brand) or just a bunch of enthusiastic youngsters giving things a try.

I still can't really see how that being a scam could specifically hurt our brand (other names seem to be dropped). As far as I can tell, neither the project nor its website appear to claim to have any special endorsement from us or any association with us though, which could be significant. From looking over the trademark regulations anyway, it seems like (as has been suggested) we could perhaps speak to them about GNOME instead of Gnome (and have a word about GNU/Linux)[1] I should emphasise that I am really no expert when it comes to licensing and trademark issues, so I hope someone who actually is one, can clarify where we are on that front!

In the meantime, getting in touch with the project organiser directly to discuss any concerns seems like a constructive suggestion, though I it seems like it's probably worth our making sure that we have a clearer idea of what specifics we are legitimately concerned about, beforehand.

Basically, they're taking advantage of people who don't know enough
about Linux to realize they are just a clone of much more serious
operating systems shipping GNOME that are already available for free.

Probably, but if we [GNOME] were to decide to actively challenge these sorts of project crowdfunder/whatevers *purely* on the basis that we [GNOME] in principle feel that charging money for a product which uses a fork of GNOME is cheating people or otherwise "taking advantage", then we would seriously need to consider what our promotion of that message could say to the world about how we value our own work (since we're worried most about potential harm to our brand and its associated products).

Magdalen

[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Resources/LicensingGuidelines