Re: gnome-logos package

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 12/17/05, Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com> wrote:
> On 12/17/05, Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman sun com> wrote:
> > Hi Luis:
> >
> > IMO there may be yet another option, i.e. the 'Debian' route, where we
> > have one logo package (the default?) that's not trademarked (though IMO
> > the 'GNOME' name should remain trademarked), and one, downloadable from
> > gnome.org, which is trademarked and therefore (perhaps ironically) not
> > part of the "community" packages.
> >
> > Whether this is desirable probably depends on who you ask, but at least
> > it would have the opt in/opt out approach; users and distros could vote
> > with their, uh, well you know what I mean...
>
> I believe I suggested this in my paper, though I forgot about it this
> morning. I believe Debian is not substantially pleased with this
> approach ATM, though I forget why- any debianites care to
> elaborate/correct me?

Urgh, I knew I shouldn't have written these posts this weekend; my
brain is still too fuzzy to think straight. There are a couple other
options:

* collective mark: basically, the mark indicates that you're a member
of a given group, instead of that the product comes from a given
manufacturer.

* certification mark: basically, the mark indicates that the good
meets certain specified standards (like using federico's proposed
gnome standards from last year) instead of it coming from a specified
manufacturer

Either of these could be used in parallel with another strategy.

Luis (probably more later tonight)

> > Luis Villa wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >Trademark law doesn't give us the flexibility we want, which leaves us
> > >with options (as I see it) that are basically:
> > >
> > >* pursue the Mozilla route (strong trademark), which I feel will
> > >alienate our contributors and completely violate the implied social
> > >contract which the GPL has created around our shared community goods
> > >(i.e., compare/contrast how we license our code and the foot- which
> > >should be more important? why would we choose to license one more
> > >liberally than the other?)
> > >
> > >* collaborate with our lawyers to create and pursue a completely
> > >novel/untested/potentially completely undefensible license that uses a
> > >novel legal approach to give the community flexible rights without (I
> > >have approached one other free software group about collaborating
> > >along these lines but it hasn't really gone anywhere, unfortunately)
> > >
> > >* give up the legally enforceable mark and use a political party
> > >approach- accept that there will be some uses we don't like and can't
> > >control, but use the mechanisms of party (speech, platform creation,
> > >etc.) to control the mark as much as possible outside of traditional
> > >trademark law.
> > >
> > >HTH-
> > >Luis
> > >
> >
> >
>