New trademark approval policy

[Jesse Keating]

On Aug 5, 2011, at 11:53 AM, David Nalley wrote:
> 
> 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.

I've lost sight of the discussion as well.  I think it started off as "why are our requirements more strict than 3rd party requirements" and I tried to address that (getting something from us should be a nicer experience than from somebody else).  Now it's sort of devolved into who is "us" vs who is "them".

In my mind, something from "us" is something the project website links to that is controlled by the project.  We try hard to not link to 3rd parties as we don't control where that link goes, and the 3rd party could change things on their end to the detriment of us.  The DVD and live media releng produces, QA tests, and infrastructure hosts counts as "us".  Cloud images generated by the cloud SIG and controlled by the cloud sig and linked to on the project websites would count as "us".  Images created by Zareason without any project input or QA oversight that is only advertised on Zareason's website would not count as "us".

I don't know of a way to codify the above, it's just a feeling I have on the matter.

--
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating