About: representing Fedora Officially in Bangladesh

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, Dec 25, 2008 at 09:53:57PM +0600, Angel wrote:
> Hi,
> I am an Ambassador of Fedora, representing Fedora in Bangladesh. I have been
> involved with Fedora Project for more than two years. Within this time frame
> I have seen interest for Fedora among my friends, classmates and my family. Now
> I would like to form our this group/community as Fedora Bangladesh.
> 
> Recently on a meeting with Bangladesh Linux Users Alliance (BLUA, a Linux
> user group working in Bangladesh to promote various Linux distro and open
> source initiative, [for your kind information: BLUA also function as parent
> organization to official Loco team of Ubuntu Linux] ), BLUA has shown
> interest of representing Fedora under the team name Fedora Bangladesh.
> However they have requested official recognition from the Fedora Project
> team to put Fedora Bangladesh under there Wing.
> 
> Soon, we are going to arrange a Fedora release party (after the election of
> Bangladesh) from our this friends, classmates community. Also we have
> already bought a country domain for Fedora Bangladesh
> fedoraproject.org.bdwebsite.
> 
> Is there any guidelines that I/we should follow forming Fedora Bangladesh
> that will give us the legal & official status to Represent Fedora in
> Bangladesh under the name Fedora Bangladesh team? Please let us know.
> 
> Thank you for your cooperation & hopefully we will be able to represent
> Fedora in Bangladesh Officially.

Thanks very much for your interest in supporting the Fedora community
in Bangladesh!

The word "Fedora" is a trademark, so we do have particular guidelines
about how it can be used.  The current guidelines are located here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal/Trademark_guidelines

However, these guidelines are still somewhat in flux and the latest
draft under review by Red Hat's Legal department is located here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pfrields/New_trademark_guidelines

To use the term "Fedora" in a domain name, you will need a formal
trademark license agreement with Red Hat.  There are several groups
also waiting for these agreements, and I have been working with Red
Hat Legal to create these agreements, so we can distribute them to the
people who need them.

The many international communities that are part of Fedora inevitably
use names that show their location, but I don't think it's necessary
for them to each create legal entities.  Doing so could create
confusion among the community, and put Red Hat's legal department in a
strange position as well, forcing them to police community groups who
are simply trying to promote Fedora in their locales.

The Fedora EMEA group is a notable exception because, first, it is a
non-profit organization that doesn't represent any single national
group, and second, it was created as a pilot project for obtaining
financial support for volunteers in that region.  There were many
requirements for this organization to make it legal in Germany where
it was formed, and to make it acceptable to Red Hat which owns the
Fedora trademarks.  There are still some details we need to work out
before extending that model to other areas, which I hope to do
sometime this year.

Please take a look at our trademark guidelines and if you have
questions we can discuss them here, or on the Fedora ambassadors
mailing list.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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