New trademark approval policy

[David Nalley]

On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 2:27 PM, Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Aug 4, 2011, at 8:33 PM, David Nalley wrote:
>>
>> Let me offer what I think is a better analogy.
>> I go to my local Porsche dealer, and he has some nice cars, but they
>> really don't have the options I am looking for on the car I want on
>> the lot. (though they have plenty of the brand and model (analogous to
>> Distribution and version). Instead - the dealer offers to order from
>> the factory the Brand and Model of car that I want, with the factory
>> options that I want. They aren't going to give me a Yugo, Ford, or
>> Ferrari engine, that's not one of the options the factory (analogous
>> for the official repository of fedora packages) will deliver. And if
>> the dealer offered to rip the engine out, and put a Yugo engine in it
>> for me, I'd agree, it'd stop being a Porsche. It would be based on a
>> Porsche, but not truly a Porsche anymore. I think this is even more
>> apropos because there are factory approved and supplied options that
>> the dealer can install and still sell and call the vehicle by the
>> Brand.
>>
>>
>
> I hate analogies, but I have a better one that is more in line with what Pam was getting at.
>
> Let's re-use the Porche thing again.
>
> You can go to a Porche dealership and order what they have on the lot, or you can have them install genuine Porche accessories at the dealership, or at the factory.  This is all well and good.  Where this breaks down is if you buy a Porche, buy some genuine parts from the factory and install them yourself, and now try to sell the car as a genuine new Porche.  It's a car, it has Porche parts on it, but was the install done right?  Did all the guidelines and directions get followed correctly?
>
> This is more in line with Fedora creating a virt image and a 3rd party creating a virt image.  The creation involves taking what we ship and $DOING_STUFF with it.  That stuff can make a difference to the end user experience, and I think that's the concern here.  Is the STUFF being done in an acceptable way to Fedora the project?  Are we comfortable letting random folks DO_STUFF to our offering and still call it Fedora?
>
> Personally, I'd like to allow folks to DO_STUFF that gets the bits we ship (say the DVD or a Live Image) onto a different medium, such as a virt image, or pre-installed on a computer.  I'd like there to be clear guidelines as to how to do THE_STUFF, and a simple checklist one can run through to make sure they've done THE_STUFF right.  The Fedora project should have the ability to ask someone to either stop offering something as Fedora, or fall in line with our (technical) guidelines.  But I don't want there to have to be an explicit "approval" for every new person that wants to DO_STUFF.
>
> Whatever else goes on, I do want there to be that feeling that if you get something from the Fedora Project (e.g. we link to it from our websites and release announcements) it had better be the top quality stuff (as top as we can make it), and that might mean the requirements for FEDORA to produce and advertise something might be higher than other people.  Just like you'd expect the experience of buying a new (or used) Porche from a Porche dealership to be a better (or at least not worse) experience than buying one from a random car lot.
>

I agree with the hating analogy point - and it falls apart here.
This gets back to who, which at least as far as I can tell the TM
guidelines don't say 'who' unless you are RHT, and then it basically
says the guidelines don't apply to RHT. And since the Fedora Project
isn't RHT the guidelines apply to the Fedora Project just as much as
they apply to $random_porsche_dealer. What it sounds like is that
people are frustrated that 'Fedora' is not the sole source of Fedora.

Here's the thing - people, be they OEMs like System76 or Zareason, or
cloud providers/ISPs like Amazon, Rackspace, and Linode, are already
building Fedora on their own, using the marks and I'd be willing to
bet they have more installs of Fedora than we have installs via media
produced or downloads.