Workstation branding on login screen (GDM)

[Owen Taylor]

On Mon, 2014-10-20 at 10:37 -0400, Christian Schaller wrote:
> > From: "Owen Taylor" <otaylor at redhat.com>
> > We can obviously ignore all of this and put a logo onto the top bar
> > anyways case, but it's an unfriendly action towards GNOME on the part of
> > Fedora. And is especially problematical because Fedora *is* seen as very
> > closely associated with GNOME, and at that point it becomes nearly
> > impossible to convince any other distro not to put their logos there as
> > well.
> 
> I think calling it an unfriendly action towards GNOME is overstating it.
> Fedora is a separate thing and is not beholden to any of its upstream
> communities, including GNOME. We try to align as much as possible with our
> upstreams because it makes sense, not because having our own ideas
> is by definition hostile towards someone else. To me this is almost the
> same argument that people make about shipping various desktops, that
> somehow not shipping desktop XYZ is somehow 'hostile' towards said
> desktop. It is not, regardless of discussing branding of the desktop we
> ship or which desktop to ship, our choice is about what is right for us
> given our requirements and resources, not about trying to 'hurt' someone 
> else.

If we took, say, Inkscape, and patched it to put a Fedora logo in the
middle of the toolbox, it would clearly be seen as poorly representing 
Inkscape. If Fedora was the most common way that people obtained and
tried out Inkscape, I'd expect that people working on Inkscape might be
upset - even if the goal of putting the logo there wasn't to provoke the
Inkscape developers. (I said "unfriendly" not "hostile")

There are certainly ways that Fedora branding can be increased in the
desktop which do make sense within the overall desktop design. I'm
interested to see what Mo and Ryan come up with and I'm sure they'll do
a good job. But I think it's important to realize that if we put
constraints onto the end goal - in particular if we require	 branding
that is continually visible - then there is an inherent conflict.

- Owen