proposal to make free the logo of Fedora

[Christofer C. Bell]

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 8:06 PM, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm pretty sure we are a copyleft tribe who are
> willing to use legal tools to provide protections...not a "I sure hope
> people don't abuse are stuff" tribe.
>
> The way forward for us is not to strip out _all_ trademark protections
> but to figure out a trademark policy that does a better job at
> balancing protections with use than the one we have now.  A trademark
> policy that offers no protection, is most likely a non-starter.

Jeff,

I've been trying to think of a non-hostile way to strenuously disagree
with the statement "There is a reasonable case to be made on both
sides of this." and been unable to.  You've hit the nail on the head.
There really is no "reasonable case" on the side of "offer a 100% free
use logo" argument.  None at all.

This very problem is facing the Debian Project (the requestor of this
change) more and more often as their "100% free logo" (the Debian
swirl without the Debian word attached) is now used to sell pretty
much anything you can think of from social networking to microwave
ovens (search for "debian logo" in the debian-legal archives to find
examples).  I am frankly surprised that there would be a request made
to the Fedora Project to enter into the same hopeless misadventure.

-- 
Chris