On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 6:53 AM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I've thought about this a bit since the meeting and I was wondering whether a process similar to third parties wanting to use the Fedora name in their URL might be appropriate. Its obviously not exact the same but its a similar style of issue. Hosting organisations like amazon (I work for a hosting provider that does cloud stuff and we deal with this) have to do licensing processes for various other OSes so I wouldn't have thought it would be a major problem or change of process for them. Max might be able to comment on that though. We could put some simple guidelines in place that wouldn't have to be repeated for each release so they basically agree not to modify etc and it would protect and enforce the trademark. spot might be able to comment on the process and whether something similar might be an appropriate compromise between the spins process and nothing at all.
Peter
Peter
At today's Board Meeting there was discussion of Fedora's trademark policy
and how it applies to various products that are produced by Fedora
Contributors and third parties. Some of the perceptions from the meeting
(note, this is *not* a complete list of perceptions. It may be one-sided.
If other attendees of the meeting wish to add to this, they sho9uld speak
up. If non-attendees to the meeting wish to add to this they should also
speak up.):
* The trademark policy allows third parties to create Fedora Images that
consist solely of software in Fedora for use in cloud hosted providers
without explicitly asking for permission to use the trademark.
* This is a good thing as pushing for explicit licensing would simply poison
our own well. ie: we want people to be able to install Fedora on their
cloud hosts. If we make the cloud providers go through the same rigorous
approval process that we demand of "official" Fedora images, we'd quickly
lose support.
* The process for Fedora Contributors to be approved to use the trademark
for their spins is quite a bit more onerous than this. It's a quite hefty
review by several different groups within Fedora whose criteria for
judging are not written down.
* Various people have ideas of how we can change the trademark guidelines
but We don't know what is needed in order to "defend the trademark" from
a legal standpoint so we can't actually approve any of those changes.
So we're soliciting input here for questions that we need to pose to Legal
in order to compose a new policy and input on what changes we'd like to make
to the policy we have.
One proposal from the meeting that we'll need to find out if Legal would
approve is:
"if the image consists solely of software from Fedora it can use the Fedora
marks without explicit review and approval from the Board" and the Board
would forgo explicit review of images in those cases. (images == spins/AMI
images/etc)
Ideas from this thread will be discussede by the Board at their next meeting
and then forwarded to Legal.
Board members are highly encouraged to put forth any of their ideas in this
thread so that the public has the opportunity to see the discussion and
comment but, as is the case whenever the Board has a phone meeting, ideas
may be presented at the meeting that have not previously been discussed on
this list and those may go on to the next stage of review by legal without
prior comment by the public.
I've thought about this a bit since the meeting and I was wondering whether a process similar to third parties wanting to use the Fedora name in their URL might be appropriate. Its obviously not exact the same but its a similar style of issue. Hosting organisations like amazon (I work for a hosting provider that does cloud stuff and we deal with this) have to do licensing processes for various other OSes so I wouldn't have thought it would be a major problem or change of process for them. Max might be able to comment on that though. We could put some simple guidelines in place that wouldn't have to be repeated for each release so they basically agree not to modify etc and it would protect and enforce the trademark. spot might be able to comment on the process and whether something similar might be an appropriate compromise between the spins process and nothing at all.
Peter
Peter
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