[FAmSCo] Ideas needed - Issue with Fedora branded items - no where to get them even for money?

Jiri Eischmann jeischma at redhat.com
Mon Feb 11 23:01:33 UTC 2013


----- Original Message -----
> From: "Christoph Wickert" <christoph.wickert at gmail.com>
> To: famsco at lists.fedoraproject.org
> Sent: Monday, February 11, 2013 8:38:27 PM
> Subject: Re: [FAmSCo] Ideas needed - Issue with Fedora branded items - no where to get them even for money?
> 
> Am Montag, den 11.02.2013, 19:21 +0100 schrieb Buddhike Kurera:
> >
> > The Problem : Fedora fans would like to get Fedora branded stuff
> > (expensive stuff) for an example polo t-shirts, jackets, bags and
> > so
> > on.
> > 
> > Benefit : Enabling such will help us to spread the Fedora brand and
> > make our fans happy.
> > 
> > Option 1 : Produce such branded items and give them free.
> 
> At the moment, this is the only option we have. However giving away
> expensive stuff for free will hurt our budget. Unless we suddenly get
> way more money then in the past, we can only purchase small
> quantities.
> This will not really help spreading Fedora as a brand. We would
> probably
> prefer our contributors, so we still don't have an offer for our
> fans.

This doesn't fly. We produced quite a lot of baseball caps and mugs and what I brought to FOSDEM was not enough for our contributors, not mentioning other people. And if you start giving free stuff away you'll suddenly have several hundred people at your booth asking for the free stuff. Price is also a great regulator.

> > Option 2  : Produce them and sell them in Fedora events or fedora
> > booths in other OSS events.
> 
> We cannot sell anything. Who is supposed to get the earnings? We
> cannot
> just let $random_ambassador keep it and we have no way to give back
> money to the community. There is no cost center and so on. Selling
> swag
> on events ultimately requires a legal entity. The only legal entity
> we
> have is Red Hat and for it's just too much hassle.
> 
> > Option 3 : Negotiate with some vendors and let them produce and
> > sell
> > these products .
> > Example :
> > http://www.debian.org/misc/merchandise
> 
> If we grant somebody trademark usage permission, we probably want to
> get
> something in return. Usually the vendor would pay us a percentage
> from
> his earnings. But again, we cannot raise money.

Well, it doesn't have to be money we get back. It can easily be the stuff they'd produce and sell. For example, for every 10 sold T-shirts we get one free for our contributors.

> > Option 4 : Fedora project/ RedHat produces these stuff and sell
> > them.
> 
> While we might be able to do this, this would not help is with
> events.
> And I doubt it will help Fedora because it would have to be sold
> under
> the umbrella of Red Hat.

No, this is not viable. Red Hat is a software company, it should not spend time selling clothes.

> > Example :
> > http://shop.opensuse.org/
> > https://shop.canonical.com/
> 
> These shops are run by the company (Canonical) or legal entity
> (openSUSE
> foundation) that runs the project, but for us things are different.
> Our
> legal entity is Red Hat, so the counterpart would be shop.redhat.com
> rather than shop.fedoraproject. Red Hat once had the "Cool Stuff
> Store",
> but even that one has ceased. Red Hat obviously has no interest
> selling
> swag.
> 
> > At the same time there are some vendors they do sell these items
> > with
> > no permission, which implies Fedora is a brand which is making
> > profit.
> > (I am not going to worry about legal concerns here, it is the Board
> > work)
> > 
> > http://www.zazzle.co.uk/eat_sleep_fedora_tees-235773473262448559
> 
> Somebody form the board should probably notify
> content_review at zazzle.com
> of that trademark violation.
> 
> > What should be the FAmSCos’ reaction on this so that our fellow FAm
> > can answer for questions like “Hey, I would like to get a Fedora
> > polo,
> > is there a place to buy them?” , should we come up with an
> > answer/plan
> > or give them the above vendors website URL?
> 
> We as FAmSCo's should make clear that we'd love selling swag but we
> cannot because Fedora is no community of it's own but depends on Red
> Hat
> as legal entity and trademark owner. Unless things at Red Hat change,
> I
> see no way to make swag or a shop happen. I know, it's frustrating,
> but
> that's how it is.

Yes, that's all FAmSCo can do... to be vocal about it. But I think it's our duty. One of the roles and tasks of FAmSCo is representing Fedora ambassadors and this is certainly a problem that troubles ambassadors a lot. So if nothing else, we should at least let people, who can do something about it, know that this is a serious problem for us.

Another thing besides T-shirts, hoodies and such stuff that brought this problem up in my mind is the future media we will distribute Fedora on. I think we all agree that DVDs are past their best times. The decreasing demand for Fedora DVDs is noticable, I meet more and more people at Fedora booths that say they don't have a DVD drive and would rather appreciate a USB drive. And this trend will continue until DVDs are completely obsolite. The problem is that USB drives with the same capacity are still 10-15x more expensive than dual-layer DVDs if you buy them in the same quantity (5,000 in our case). And I don't think the price will get close the to DVD's one any time soon. The capacity increases, but the price of the cheapest USB drives has been the same for last two year ($4-5). At least in EMEA, unfortunately we cannot afford to spend $20k on media per release. I saw at FOSDEM that some other projects already started selling USB drives and I'm afraid it's the only way to cover the cost. That's an upcoming problem we should also think of.

Jiri 


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