On Mon, 2017-03-13 at 12:43 +0000, Simon McVittie wrote: > On Sun, 12 Mar 2017 at 00:52:25 +0000, Alberto Ruiz wrote: > > There has been many instances of us protecting our brand by asking > > people to > > stop using our logo for commercial purposes, CC-BY-SA/LGPLv3 does > > grant > > precisely the right to use it commercially. > > There are two things a third party needs to do to use the GNOME name > and logo legally: > > * Not infringe trademarks: they need to be either using them in a > way that is not protected by trademark law (for instance writing a > Wikipedia page about GNOME, or describing MATE/Cinnamon/etc. as > being based on GNOME), or using it in a way for which GNOME > specifically gives permission. > > * Not infringe copyright: for the logo specifically, they need to be > allowed to copy it without infringing the copyright held by whoever > designed/made the logo. The GNOME *name* is far too short to be > protected by copyright, so this doesn't apply; so GNOME needs > (and has) a trademark policy covering at least the name, regardless > of what is done about the logo. > > Briefly, copyright is about an author's right to control copying of > their work (and potentially make money by selling permission to > copy it). Trademarks are about a vendor's right to not have their > reputation damaged by applying their name, logo, or other things > that are recognised by consumers to an inferior product. > > Open source software is unusual because the inferior product is > often a modified version of the "real" product, rather than a > reimplementation (for instance Mozilla has had a lot of trouble with > third parties offering modified versions of Firefox that bundle > or contain malware, but I'm not aware of anyone publishing things > that were not based on Firefox at all and calling *those* Firefox); > but trademarks, not copyright, are the right weapon against that. > > I think what you need here is a trademark license that forbids what > you want to forbid, in particular using the GNOME name or the GNOME > logo to identify things that are not GNOME. > <https://www.gnome.org/foundation/legal-and-trademarks/> already > provides this. > > (Ab)using copyright licenses to do the job of trademarks typically > leads to using copyright licenses that certainly don't meet the > Open Source Definition (or similar definitions like the FSF's > Free Software Definition and Debian's Debian Free Software > Guidelines), and in many cases forbid perfectly reasonable forms > of distribution altogether. This is how we got into the silly > Firefox/Iceweasel situation, which has only recently been resolved > (Mozilla's logos are now covered by a permissive copyright license > but a much more restrictive trademark license).
That was what I would have said, if Simon didn't put it so eloquently. So +1 for a permissive license for the artwork itself, we can control its usage through the GNOME trademark. Cheers _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
