Re: merchandising GNOME

[Dave Neary <bolsh gnome org>]

Hi Patrick,

Patrick Wagstrom wrote:
> 3. We've talked about getting and selling T-Shirts before, and I'm
> willing to put up some of my own money to seed this.  I imagine selling
> the shirts for slightly over cost to help me recover some (not all) of
> the funds, and then use the rest to keep the venture going.  However,
> the GNOME foot is trademarked, and thus, I don't believe that I can
> legally print up T-Shirts for GNOME and sell them.  Can someone who
> knows this messy issue help me out here?  The only link I can find on
> the website is for the old design foot too.

This is what gnome-fr did a couple of years back, to good effect. There
are trademark issues, as you point out, but user group usage of the
trademark can be covered by a user group trademark agreement which can
be signed online, and which allows this type of usage.

As Quim said, this is the type of activity which we should be
encouraging, not discouraging. When it gets to a point where we have
dozens of t-shirt designs and t-shirts of varying quality, it might be
time to put the foot down, centralise production of a few prints and
move to distribution of t-shirts to user groups on a cost basis, but
some work is needed to get to that stage.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
bolsh gnome org