[Fedora-spins] When to rebrand fedora?

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 09:48 +0200, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
> Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 00:44 +0200, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
> >> Bryan Kearney wrote:
> >>> In the same way that there is a generic-logos is there any reason to not 
> >>> provide a generic-release? That way rebrandins is the following in the 
> >>> kickstart file
> >>>
> >> We have not required fedora-release to not be on the rebranded system as 
> >> of yet. Rebranding means removing the trademarked materials which are 
> >> all in fedora-logos (except for /etc/fedora-release which is responsible 
> >> for "Fedora" popping up in the little "Welcome to (...)!" message when 
> >> you boot up.
> > 
> > Wouldn't this make sense to do, though?  Especially seeing as how the
> > name "Fedora" is part of the trademark.
> > 
> 
> I'm CC:'ing the Fedora Spins list for other people that might show 
> interest in this discussion.
> 
> To me it doesn't make sense removing fedora-release from a downstream 
> distribution and then still say "based on Fedora" or "Fedora 
> derivative". This, in my opinion, should not be a requirement. I'd like 
> to enable people to do it anyway, with the click of a mouse, but it's 
> not that simple at this point.

I wasn't sure of the complexity required to create such a solution.

> Fwiw the Fedora Spin SIG only requires new spin concepts that do not yet 
> have Board Approval to exclude fedora-logos from their package manifest. 
> Requiring anything more then that also involves more work for the spin 
> requester/maintainer (and a little more for the Spin SIG as well).
> 
> How we handle fedora-release being the cause for "Welcome to (...)" is 
> also a thread on -devel, and afaic is a cosmetic thing for downstream 
> distributions, not a requirement from Fedora (IMO).

Agreed, the cosmetic solution might simply be to change /etc/issue, or
some such other downstream bit.

> Taking this a little further, the trademark policy can simply not 
> require a downstream distribution to remove all occurrences of the 
> Fedora trademark (as a string) from the entire system. Although I'd like 
> to enable them to do so, it's simply not scalable to keep track of where 
> the Fedora name might occur in a package name, file name or file contents.

Yes, I think this would be an onerous and extremely unworkable
requirement too.  I was only thinking of the case in derivative spins
that use non-Fedora stuff, where we don't want users confused as to
where they're going to get help.  This discussion has been hashed over
many times so there's no need to have it again here, I guess... :-)  The
new trademark guidelines (hopefully) will make it possible to allow a
better connection to Fedora as the upstream but still make it clear that
a distro is derived from Fedora and is not itself Fedora.

> Since we're on the topic, I've also suggested on the "new trademark 
> policy" wiki page[1], that rebranding should not be required in case you 
> hand out a presentation or demo in case of an ISV, if you have built it 
> upon Fedora and are simply handing it out to attendees of your session 
> (which kinda equals to limited distribution, e.g. non-public). Same 
> might apply to downstream vendors distributing appliances (like VMWare 
> used to distribute .vmx files for some operating systems/distributions?)
> 
> Anyway, these are just some of the thoughts that cross my mind drinking 
> my first cup of coffee today... Let me know what you think ;-)

This part I'm not so sure of.  "Limited distribution" in an age of
convenient bit-moving doesn't mean a whole lot.  Rather, we should be
working on automation for rebranding that makes the whole operation easy
for anyone that wants to do it -- so the requirement is less onerous.

-- 
Paul W. Frields
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://paul.frields.org/   -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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