Re: gnome-logos package

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

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...

Bill

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