Re: [gentoo-nfp] Gentoo Trademark License (name/logo usage)

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Sat, 21 Dec 2013, Sven Vermeulen wrote:

>> - In section "Gentoo-related software projects", how is the term
>> "official Gentoo project software" defined?

> Ok, I'll see if I can find a proper definition for this. Something
> along the lines of "Official Gentoo project software is software
> whose main homepage is hosted on the gentoo.org domain" or so?

In fact, this is what I was wondering about. These would be more or
less the "Gentoo Hosted Projects" in Bugzilla, i.e. Portage, OpenRC,
Catalyst, eselect, etc. Why should some software that extends them be
called "Gentoo-foo" or "foo-Gentoo"? For example, would we like it if
a third-party Portage fork was called "Gentoo-Portage"? I think not.
Maybe there are other examples where this would make more sense, but I
fail to find one.

To me it looks like that paragraph might be well suited for a project
like Django, but I wonder what purpose it would serve for a distro
like us.

> Do you think the license is an improvement versus the current one
> (about making things more clear)?

Difficult to say out of the blue, but my approach would be to look at
past and present examples of logo usage, and check how well both old
and new licenses cover them.

Two issues that the new license would certainly solve: First, it would
get rid of the commercial/non-commercial distinction which IMHO is
problematic. Second, current guidelines try to restrict usage of all
"Gentoo artwork", and I think that in many cases there isn't any basis
for this. For example, images of Larry are distributed under CC-BY-SA
and there's no trademark on them. So I believe that it is a good thing
if the new license focusses on the trademark only.

Disclaimer: IANAL, TINLA.

Ulrich