Fedora Trademark Guidelines Revised Draft Comments

[David Nalley]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 11:05 PM, Tom Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 03/29/2012 01:08 PM, inode0 wrote:
>
>> My feathers are admittedly ruffled because I find it absurd that the
>> work that we have done for years is resulting in our being singled out
>> as a group that needs to be micro-managed by Fedora Legal. I'm sure
>> that isn't the perspective of Fedora Legal, at least I hope it isn't.
>> But I have not been given any reasonable justification for treating
>> Ambassadors this way and no one else.
>
> Sometimes I'm rather stunned at how people jump to the conclusion that
> they're being singled out as victims.

So let me explain why I think folks are irked at all of this.

Contributors, mostly Ambassadors, have for many years been producing
Fedora swag. They've often times been cited for the higher-quality,
less expensive swag by the Red Hat-employed Fedora leadership. They've
been inherently trusted, and even encouraged to take on that role by
that same Red Hat-employed Fedora leadership (speaking corporately,
not of a single individual). None of this was done in an effort to
subvert RHT control of it's marks, or to cause problems, but rather
with the urging of folks inside Red Hat. This isn't to say that
everything has been perfect, there's certainly been problem swag, but
the same could be said of Red Hat-produced Fedora (and Red Hat for
that matter) swag as well.

Now, the trademark guidelines seek to solve some 'problems' - which
are listed as:

* RHT can't let anyone do what they want - inappropriate things might
happen like Fedora-logoed condoms.

* RHT has to control quality - we can't have sloppy swag ruining the
Fedora mark's good name.

What that really gets interpreted as is: RHT thinks that Fedora
contributors a) don't care about, and can't be trusted with the Fedora
brand and would engage in activities that would sully it's reputation.
b) RHT thinks that there are currently problems that are so egregious
with what we are doing now that they must be fixed despite the fact
that it's been going on with few complaints for many years.

I despise the use of analogies in such situations, but sadly I don't
have the wit of Konstantin Ryabitsev [0], so, lets s/swag/packages/g:

Despite the fact that the Fedora packagers have been producing
generally good quality packages for years, Red Hat has decided that to
control quality, package reviews must be performed by specially
anointed Red Hat employees. Otherwise we might have packages that are
of poor quality, or that are clearly inappropriate and sully the
Fedora brand.

So rather than a legal issue this is viewed by folks as being told
that they are clearly doing such a poor job that very well paid and
busy lawyers and engineering managers see it as worthy of spending
copious amounts of time solving what clearly must be a terrible
situation (the quality issue continues to be mentioned, as well as
things that would reflect poorly upon Fedora like logoed condoms).

How about this:
Red Hat acknowledges that Fedora contributors are generally not
idiots, generally have Fedora's best interest at heart and we want to
make sure they can get things done in the furtherance of Fedora's
goals. At the same time we have a desire to protect the Fedora marks,
and sadly the trademark system is ill equipped to deal with such an
open source project. Here's what we have to do to satisfy both ends:
Red Hat will assume no mental defect, and no malice - you've been
doing awesome work for years, but we need to be notified when approved
swag is manufactured. We also  trust that you won't hand out
defective, low quality swag, and would alert us and the rest of the
community to such problems.
We also generally trust your judgement for what kind swag to produce,
but we need to be able to demonstrate that we have some control, so
please notify us in advance before new designs are registered. We
request that you give us two days notice. If you don't hear back from
us in that time period, consider that tacit consent, though we will
try and at least ACK your request, but do understand that however
unlikely, we can veto the design. (though we'll try and assist you in
rectifying the design to comply with usage guidelines)

That's essentially the same work flow, except it a) defaults to
trusting contributors; and b) puts the onus on RHT for vetoing designs
rather than having the onus on contributors to gain RHT's blessing.

--David



[0] http://lwn.net/Articles/83360/