Hi all,
Back in October, during the firefox/iceweasel dispute, Branden Robinson
and I expressed a little exasperation on IRC that Debian wasn't really
setting a great example itself in how it licenses its logos. We had a
bit of a chat about that and that resulted in a rough agreement on what
to do, which Branden wrote up on the Debian wiki at:
http://wiki.debian.org/ProposedTrademarkPolicy
Since then, that hasn't seen much real feedback, so I've been reluctant to
push it any further -- it's hard to tell whether a lack of feedback means
"we don't care, that sounds fine", "this is too complicated, whatever
you do is wrong", or just "we haven't heard about this or looked at it".
Fortunately, I had the opportunity to do a bit of a straw poll at the
Debian miniconf at LCA of what people thought about freeing up the Debian
trademark policy, and it seems that people there were pretty much for
the idea.
As such at the end of this week, I'm planning on asking the SPI board to
relicense the Debian logos as follows:
* both logos shall be released under the MIT copyright license:
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction,
including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge,
publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software,
and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,
subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY
KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS
BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN
AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR
IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.
* the "open use" logo will not be enforced as a trademark; anyone may
use it or create similar logos in whatever way they like, though
we will continue using it to refer to and promote Debian.
* the "official use" logo will be enforced as an unregistered
trademark; and we will only authorise use of the logo or similar
logos where the product or service being referred to is officially
related to Debian (such as an official CD image, a t-shirt promoting
debian.org, a Debian developer's business card)
I think that's a good way of ensuring both our logos meet the DFSG,
and also provides both a good experiment in a completely free trademark
license that fairly accurately reflects our current treatment of the
open use logo as well as a reasonable example for groups who want to
have some protection for their brand but still be a good citizen of the
free software community.
Anyway, if anyone has some fairly convincing reasons why the above
is a bad idea, please do speak up now. If you think it's a good idea,
and want to refute the "no feedback" issue mentioned above, feel free
to comment too. :)
Cheers,
aj
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature