[CentOS-devel] Opensourcing the CentOS brand creative work, licensing thoughts

Sat Sep 3 17:53:46 UTC 2022
Alain Reguera Delgado <alain.reguera at gmail.com>

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-logo.svg


Thanks Shaun, for sharing your experience in GNOME. It has been very
useful.

-- 
Alain Reguera Delgado <alain.reguera at gmail.com>
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