User talk:Pfrields/New trademark guidelines

Use this page to discuss problems that are not yet resolved with the use cases seen on the content page itself.

Business cards

(Should we point people here to Ambassadors/BusinessCards? Do we want people to use the business card template that we advertise, or are we ok with anything homemade? We need to follow up on Ian's work to make a new Business Card template. --Max)

Spins with patches

So, the granting of trademark permission is only based on whether or not 100% of the spin is in the Fedora repositories? Is there any sort of "usefulness" or "originality of spin" requirement, or is that a separate process? --Max

I think there needs to be some sort of 'usefulness/originality' metric for anything advertising it as 'Fedora <whatever>'. -- Bill

If it's gonna be named "Fedora <whatever>" it has gone through the Spin Submission Process, which takes into account the usefulness of spins being advertised as "Fedora <whatever>".

We will however, NOT accept spins with patches unless there's a very, very good reason. Topic in this little thread might be a little misleading --Jeroen

Domain names

Well, we can't exactly force this on anyone - see fedora.org. -- Bill

• I'd like to find out how much carrot and how much stick have been applied in that particular case to date. -- Paul

Hybrid? FOSS? ISV?

On the "Hybrid Pure Fedora-derived spins and additional content on same medium", or "Pure Fedora-derived spins", not entirely clear:

• Joe wants to hand out his Presentation/Artwork on a Fedora Live CD or USB thumb drive - pure Fedora, added content
• Doh Inc. wants to demo their ISV product

"Hybrid pure derived?"

Which is it?

1. Hybrid? Free and Open Source software altogether, found in Fedora, but with added content?
2. Pure? Pure genuine Fedora altogether?
3. Derived? Recompiled and rebranded and not Fedora anymore?

• This is an interesting question. I would say the Live USB presents a thornier issue. With a Live CD, the image in its entirety is what makes up the content of the media. With a Live USB, it's not as simple -- because someone can distribute materials outside the image we call "Fedora." My take on it is that if someone takes advantage of that Live USB feature to distribute some added content outside the Live image, we don't have any controlling interest in that "outside space," if you will. We'd want someone in that case to refer to it as "Fedora plus X added content." The previous guidelines allowed for that sort of treatment, as long as the distributor leaves the addition of the outside materials to the user's discretion. The distributor could even include an Autorun enabler, as long as it didn't automatically take any action without the user being given the choice. -- Paul

• See below, but i think that there are two items "Based On" and "Derived From". Based on adds packages to Fedora, but does not change anythin in Fedora. It would be nice to have to rebrand in that case.. or have a fedora-based-logos.rpm (This is your Hybrid Model). Derived changes something in fedora. I could see not supporting Derived. -- bkearney
  • This seems like a very confusing approach to me. I think this is best covered with a simple approach -- either a derived spin is only made with materials from the Fedora repositories, or it is not. Having two different marks like this has already been proven to be unworkable, see Microsoft's earlier forays into "Made for Vista," "Vista certified," et al. The more clever we try to be, the more problems we are likely creating. I don't think we want to go there. -- Paul

Appliances (Related to ISVS)

• Live USB, and Appliance tools allow anyone to distribute running systems. It is highly likely that they will want to add additional software (both FOSS and not) to the media. I would like to see a policy which allows them to say "based on fedora". I believe it would need to have the following guidelines. (bkearney)
  1. Include fedora repositories
  2. Include different fedora logos
  3. Only add packages which are not in fedora (i.e. I can not replace glibc and say it is "based" on fedora). Per this from mark webbink, I believe that the additional packages in (3) need not be FOSS. There is probably some additional license statement/requirements that must be done to allow this. (bkearney)
  • The actual text will probably not be "based on Fedora." But we will find some acceptable term that makes sense. (pfrields)
  • The document to which you link concerns FOSS licensing and patentability, but doesn't really have anything to do with trademark guidelines. But I agree completely that the downstream applicance creator who uses any non-Fedora materials in an applicance would be responsible for addressing any of the licensing concerns over and above what Fedora provides. (pfrields)