Re: trademark policy draft

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 06:07:17PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli a écrit :
> 
> - there is a potential exception to the "as free as possible" principle,
>   though, in the following provision:
> 
>     You can also make merchandise with DEBIAN trademarks for commercial
>     usage provided that, in addition to following the guidelines listed
>     below, you truthfully advertise to customers which part of the
>     selling price will be donated to the DEBIAN project.

Hi Stefano,

thank you for your work on this subject.

In my opinion, we should give as few restrictions as possible, in the spirit of
our Social Contract and the DFSG.  In particular, we do not accept software
with restrictions on commercial use.

I think that we should show the example and remove restrictions on the
commercial use of our trademark.  We can of course, in a non-normative section,
keep a recommendation to indicate if a donation will be made to Debian.

Here are minor comments.

 - It would be nice to indicate somewhere which restrictions stem from
   laws, and which restrictions are additions by us.

 - If this policy focuses on trademarks owned by SPI, perhaps it can
   exhaustively list them ?

 - Is it necessary to capitalise DEBIAN in the document ?

 - Requests to "not be misleading" and be "truthful" are vague.

 - When one can use the Debian trademarks without asking, is it because of fair
   use, or is it because Debian grants a trademark license ?

 - Imagine that we in Debian follow the spirit of this policy when using other
   trademarks (GNOME, Linux, etc.) in our websites.  Wouldn't the requriement
   of including a disclaimer be a bit heavy ?

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan