Unofficial Fedora Remix being advertised on the project front page

[inode0]

On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 7:04 PM, Tom Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 10/16/2013 07:32 PM, inode0 wrote:
>> Pidora was made a special case when Red Hat granted them permission to
>> use that trademark on a remix. And while I think that was a mistake,
>> it is water under the bridge and all we can tell other remixes now is
>> you aren't as special as Pidora is to us.

I apologize if that came off a bit snarky. But I do think this is
going to be a special case and I think the pidora work deserves to be
a special case.

> Not quite. The team of folks at Seneca working on the Fedora Remix for
> the Raspberry Pi were concerned that by calling in the "Fedora Remix for
> the Raspberry Pi", they weren't getting the same name recognition as the
> defacto standard: "Rasbian" (Debian rebuild/customized image for the
> Raspberry Pi). They asked if they could use the name "Pidora", and I
> thought that was a reasonable request.

I agree that is a reasonable request from their perspective at least.
>From our perspective it is a questionable call since helping to more
closely tie this remix with Fedora is counter to one of the goals of
the remix branding, which is to safely distance the project from a
remix and to make it very clear through the mark that this is not a
Fedora Project product.

> I took that request to Red Hat to consider, and I honestly thought
> they'd have issue with it, but they approved it, under the condition
> that Red Hat owns the trademark (which it now does). We then gave
> permission to that Remix to use the "Pidora" trademark in place of the
> Fedora Remix for the Raspberry Pi. They still have to follow all of the
> other rules for the Remix, they just have permission to use an alternate
> secondary mark.

I wish you had also brought it to the Fedora Board for feedback. I
understand that isn't a legal requirement but I think going beyond
legal requirements to protect the Fedora brand isn't a bad thing
either.

> I am willing to apply this procedure to any other interested Remix
> (including creation of an alternate secondary mark, owned by Red Hat). I
> don't have the final call on this (other folks inside Red Hat Legal have
> to sign off on new trademarks), but I'm happy to drive any such requests
> forward.

So just for the record I don't have a problem with granting marks
owned by Red Hat (on behalf of Fedora) to Fedora related projects in
general. In this particular case my only objection is that the
similarity of the marks to the Fedora Project marks is too great and I
believe will confuse people into thinking/assuming that pidora is a
Fedora Project product. Others may think the opposite and we'll likely
never know for sure how much if any brand confusion results.

Advertising pidora on the front page of the Fedora Project website
probably reinforces the misconception that I think this request was
intended to create as well. Although I don't object to such
advertising in general or in this particular case as I think we both
benefit from it on balance.

John