Re: Minutes of the Board Meeting of January, 19th, 2016

[Alexandre Franke <afranke gnome org>]

Hello,

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 10:01 PM, Allan Day <aday gnome org> wrote:
The Foundation first started licensing sellers of GNOME merchandise in 2008.
> Over the years, we've had advice from various lawyers. I'm not aware of any
> of them ever telling us that we couldn't or shouldn't license merchandise
> sellers who are using our trademark.
>
> It should also be noted that other Free Software foundations license their
> trademarks in a similar way, and that unixstickers and similar sellers are
> used to signing these agreements.
>
> It might be interesting for us to extend the trademark registrations we have
> to include merchandise, but I haven't seen any evidence that we shouldn't
> continue with the established practice of trademark licensing.

In addition to that, the logo and wordmark are not only protected by
trademark, but also by copyright which belongs to the GNOME
Foundation.

-- 
Alexandre Franke
GNOME Hacker & Foundation Director