Practically speaking, I don’t think we’ll ever[1] accept general donations, in-kind or cash. We do have a mechanism for sponsoring events, etc. Fedora isn’t a separate legal entity, so it’s hard (and also weird) to have people make donations to a for-profit company (Red Hat), even if they’re directed for community use.
That said, we do have licensed merchandise available in a variety of places. Red Hat’s Cool Stuff Store and HELLOTUX both have approved merchandise. There are probably other sites, too, which brings me to
I think it would help for us to have a single website with a list of vendors with approved Fedora-branded gear. There are, I think, a few wiki pages scattered around, but I don’t think they’re actively maintained. I know @mattdm is working on putting together a list of people to whom we’ve granted trademark approval, which would be a good starting point for such a page.
Did that store go down for maintenance since you shard that link? Or… is it only for folks with accounts? Every link there drops to a login prompt. (Bold move for a distro store… ^_^).
It’s difficult to have a separate Fedora swag store — although it might be worth looking into. When Red Hat switched providers for theirs, it had this surprising property. We’ve asked about it, but as Red Hat is growing so fast, it turns out that everyone now has no memory that it used to be, like, a normal site where you can browse without logging in. So… we’ve requested that but it seems to be a rather uphill battle.
Update on this: there is a new “cool stuff store” in the works, and as I understand it, merch will be visible without registration / login. So that’s something.
A note, though: if someone really wants to run with this and set something up, we could grant a trademark license, and we could do some promotion as we did for Hello Tux and others. We’d want to make sure the merch is high quality and represents Fedora well, of course (in line with our normal trademark policies for this kind of thing).
Donations are harder, but we could also consider a trademark license for a non-profit with the right structure. I for one would be interested in seeing a proposal.
In the meantime, i recommend we close this ticket, because I don’t think we have anything at this time which we can act on. Not that it’s a bad idea, just… all of the above stuff.
