GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 644932
Update fgo licensing page with new content
Last modified: 2018-09-24 10:16:31 UTC
Note that I have been working with James Vasile from the Software Freedom Law Center to update the standard GNOME Foundation brand licensing forms. These new forms, for example, allow User's Groups to sell GNOME branded merchandise (as long as the profits are only used for GNOME-related activities). The current forms on fgo disallow this, so the new forms would be nice to put in place more officially: The work includes: Update this Licensing page as follows: http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/index.html - We now have a standard form for those who sell GNOME branded merchandise. On http://live.gnome.org/Trademark, the new form is in the section "Commercial Trademark Exploitation Agreements" http://live.gnome.org/Trademark#Commercial_Trademark_Exploitation_Agreements So, on the fgo page, we should add a section to highlight that The GNOME Foundation uses this following form for those who sell GNOME branded merchandise. In other words, you can only sell GNOME branded merchandise if you have made this agreement with The GNOME Foundation. - The "GNOME user group license agreement" link should point to the new form: http://live.gnome.org/Trademark#Trademark_Agreement_for_User_Groups Note that the new form allows Users Groups to sell GNOME-branded merchandise with the requirement that funds received be used for the benefit of the GNOME Users Group and that the funds be kept in a tax-free bank account (e.g. you could use The GNOME Foundation's account). The old form did not allow Users Groups to sell any merchandise. So the new form fixes this. Might be nice to highlight this change. In the "User Groups" section of the form, I think it would probably be good to also include a link to the Users Groups Wiki, just so people understand more about what a GNOME User Group is: http://live.gnome.org/UserGroups - Our lawyers recommended that we should update the "Third Party Usage Guidelines" page: http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/guidelines/ and remove this line: * Do not use GNOME Trademarks as meta tags for your web pages. James Vasile gave this reason: > That looks ok to me, except the part about meta tags. Do we really > care about that? In the trademark world, fighting over meta tags is a > disfavored practice. There's a chance you *might* be able to enforce > it legally, but the bad publicity would make it counterproductive. I > suggest you remove it. - I think it would make sense to get rid of the following Wiki pages and move the content to the fgo page: http://live.gnome.org/Trademark http://live.gnome.org/Trademark/FAQ Much of the information on the http://live.gnome.org/Trademark page is redundant, but we should make sure that any useful information is migrated to the fgo website. We should add the FAQ to the fgo website. - Note that the Users Group form refers to this website. It might be better for this page to be moved to fgo as well (perhaps to http://foundation.gnome.org/users or something), so it is a bit more official. http://live.gnome.org/UserGroups/Guidelines Can these changes be made? Thanks, Brian
Created attachment 183549 [details] Users Group form PDF format
Created attachment 183550 [details] User's Group form in TEX format
I attached updated versions of the User's Group forms put together by Tobias Mueller that I think are a bit better formatted than the one on the Wiki. I'd use this version. A few more comments: - Note that the Users Group form is currently a web form that the user signs by entering their contact information and clicking the "Submit" button. We want to get rid of this form and instead expect the person to print it out, fill it out, and mail it to The GNOME Foundation. So this should be changed, and the instructions should clarify that this is how people should do things. - I think it might be best to provide the forms in PDF as a standard format if that sounds reasonable.
Any update? This has been sitting idle for a month, and I was under the impression this was not a lot of work that was going to be done soon.
hm. Now that the foundation website has moved, I don't know where the licensing content has gone to :-\ Unfortunately, we have a wordpress instance now, and no repository which allows local and offline searching :-\ You can still, nonetheless, upload the changes to the foundation-web repository and we can then see, how to migrate stuff from there onto the new site.
(In reply to comment #5) > hm. Now that the foundation website has moved, I don't know where the licensing > content has gone to :-\ http://www.gnome.org/foundation/legal-and-trademarks/
So this is, what is currently reads: Third-party usage guidelines Under the law, “fair use” of trademarks is allowed (for example, trademarks typically may be used without permission in magazine and book reviews). The GNOME Foundation trademark usage guidelines for third parties describe what is appropriate fair use of the GNOME trademarks. User group license agreement User groups are a very important part of the GNOME community. User groups have a need to make use of the GNOME trademarks in such ways as creating and distributing marketing materials or creating web sites. (The usage of the term user group here is broad: the canonical example would be a group of people using and promoting GNOME in a specific locality, but it could also be a group of developers working on an open source GNOME application or many similar non-commerical uses.) By agreeing to the GNOME user group license agreement a user group obtains permission to use the GNOME trademarks under certain conditions. So the new website apparently has changed the wording. The rest of the changes seem to be in the wiki. Hence I think the bug can be assigned to live.gnome.org.
reassigning as per last comment.
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