On Thu, 2022-09-01 at 13:00 -0400, Shaun McCance wrote:
So, I'm going to approach this from my experience on the GNOME board. The GNOME logo is licensed under a CC-BY-SA license, which allows people to modify and reuse it. But it's also trademarked, which means you can't use it in a way that would imply GNOME is doing something it isn't. This is deliberate, and was informed by Karen Sandler (actual lawyer, previously executive direction of GNOME Foundation, now at Software Freedom Conservancy). So, for example, there was one of those "fish exfoliate your feet" places that used a modification of the GNOME logo. This is allowed under the copyright license, and it's not a violation of trademark because it's a different industry. But if you used the GNOME logo to make, for example, a Linux distribution, then there would be a clear trademark problem.
Again, not speaking for Red Hat here, but this is what I'd advise CentOS (and most other open source projects) to do. Use an open license like a CC license, but use trademark law to protect our identity and reputation.
Releasing the work under the terms of CC-BY-SA license and using trademark law to protect it is totally fine to me. I agree with it. I will add a new section in the repository where the design sources are stored to explicitly set this.
Also, I am definitely not a lawyer, but Alain I think you legally hold the copyright on the new logo, unless you did a copyright assignment.
I haven't done any copyright assignment. I am ok holding the copyright on the new logo if that would be the case.
I've been wanting to revamp our trademark use guidelines to be more permissive in certain cases (for example, hosting providers showing that they support CentOS). It would be nice to come up with wording for these kinds of cases, and to have some ready-made badge with the logo they can use.
We have an image for a similar purpose in the httpd testing page, but probably it needs more work to fit the need. Here is the link:
https://gitlab.com/areguera/centos-brand/-/blob/v2/Sources/centos-poweredby-...
Thanks Shaun, for sharing your experience in GNOME. It has been very useful.