Good points. I am more concerned with careless and/or petty misrepresentation. I would like to make it easier for someone who works with the code to recognize what is needed to differentiate what they are producing. It is a variant of the condition which has category-B software be handled the way it is at Apache. In this particular case it seems valuable to me that the source release is something that helps downstream producers of binaries, including ourselves, get it right. A casual use of the build process should perhaps produce something that does not appear the same as a released AOO binary.
With regard to intentional passing-off, I agree that more serious precautions are required to establish the provenance of binaries distributed by AOO and in having folks be able to tell the difference and, of course, find the goods in reliable ways. And other downstream producers of distributions should be able to accomplish the same thing by establishing the provenance of their binary distributions. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Rob Weir [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2012 13:12 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: logo source files Just a quick tag to the above. We need to be careful whether we trying to solve a communications problem or a legal problem. If we're talking about inadvertent trademark misuse, then we have two lightweight solutions: 1) Make it harder for someone to accidentally misuse the trademark via education, but also by not encouraging using of our core marks, but instead encouraging use of separate "community marks" that are not also used to identify our products. So segregation of two kinds of logos. 2) Handle with education and friendly contacts those who do inadvertently infringe. If we're talking about intentional misuse of the marks, then that is an entirely different issue. Playing around with where we put the logos, whether in the trunk or in another directory, or any other "soft" technological teams will have almost zero impact. If someone wants to misuse the trademark then they will easily overcome these inconveniences. The keys to dealing with intentional misuse are: 1) A documented trademark policy that makes it clear which uses are permitted and which are not. 2) Strong methods, cryptographic methods, to ensure that our official releases can be identified. 3) User education, so they know to look for such official releases. Does this make sense? -Rob
