@msuchy filed Fedora-Council/tickets ticket #460. Discuss here and record votes and decisions in the ticket.
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I think we should keep the status quo. In general, we don’t want unauthorized changes to our marks.
I’ll repeat what I put in the GitLab issue for posterity’s sake:
If we are changing the license to CC-BY-ND, we should be clear-eyed that this is not a Free license. Neither does the Creative Commons distinguish the NoDerivatives clause as a Free Culture license. It takes away one of the Four Freedoms of the right to modify and make changes to the work. It does open questions for how other communities (especially user communities) could modify and change the work.
Perhaps NoDerivatives is what we want here, but there is an enforcement question that realistically we will need to consider. What do we do when someone modifies the Fedora logo in some way? If they add a country flag or a rainbow into the Fedora logo, does this mean we should pursue those as license violations? Speaking for myself, I have neither the interest nor capacity in pursuing cases like that.
Looking at the Digital Public Goods Standard, to which Fedora is a party of, they permit the NonCommercial variants but not the NoDerivatives variants for recognized Digital Public Goods. And thinking for myself, the NonCommercial license is actually the kind of use I would rather enforce and act upon for Fedora than NoDerivatives. I might not care whether someone remixes the Fedora logo in a way that personalizes it to their community, but I would care if someone is using the Fedora brand and trademark to sell a commercial product, or make it appear that Fedora supports or endorses their commercial product. In this case, I’d want someone to request trademark permission through the Fedora Council, as they would already today.
As I understand it from Richard’s original comment, the status quo is in violation of our existing policies and there is no exception in place for what we have with the logos. So, something needs to change. @ref outlined five possible options that we could pursue, one of which was a license change.
We could also opt to keep our proprietary license and update the guidelines so that the trademarks remain an exception to existing licensing policy, although I would contest that this is in sharp contrast to how several of our user communities already reuse and remix the Fedora logo in a variety of ways.
I don’t want to be the person going and chasing a Fedora community in some country for remixing the Fedora logo to use a country’s flag as part of the artwork. Would that meet the logo guidelines? No. Does it really have a detrimental impact on Fedora? Not really. Would it have a detrimental impact on community morale for some Red Hatter to come with a threat to stop using the logo? Potentially.
There is a note somewhere, I can’t remember where, about complying with the Fedora CoC in order to use the Fedora logo and brand. I’m not sure if this is something that would be overwritten or not by switching to a CC license. Would we have any control over that in this case, versus what we have now? Historically, this is a power we have used when the administrators of a specific Fedora user community were breaking the Fedora CoC on a regular basis, and we asked them to stop using our logo to clearly separate them from the core Fedora community.
Is there a way that we could preserve that protection here somehow?
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Copyright and trademark law are separate. Switching to a CC license wouldn’t prevent us from enforcing use in a trademark context, but it makes the situation confusing for everyone.
Let’s keep it simple and explicitly grant ourselves an exception that we’ve implicitly relied on. That’s what I meant by keeping the status quo.
Wikipedia takes the exciting stance that the logo is actually public domain, giving the rationale
This logo image consists only of simple geometric shapes or text. It does not meet the threshold of originality needed for copyright protection, and is therefore in the public domain. Although it is free of copyright restrictions, this image may still be subject to other restrictions
Having seen the work that went into designing both the new logo and the old one, I’m quite skeptical of that claim — but I am not a lawyer.
But — in combination with our brewing thoughts on relaxing some of our rules on producing non-commercial, non-official swag items — that does get me thinking. What if we relaxed the copyright license significantly (CC-BY-SA), while also more strongly emphasizing trademark rules and our brand guidelines?
The brand guidelines have some amount of “teeth” given by the trademark, but I’m optimistically thinking that if we make those more prominent, people will want to respect our wishes (and not make @duffy very sad with horrific home-brewed “variants”).
As I understand it, we only allow CC0 for content, not code, particularly because it specifically says “No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document.” In this case, that seems like exactly what we want.
For the record, yes. From the Fedora legal license repo, @rfontana says:
The inconsistency between the fedora-logos license and general Fedora licensing policy was noted in the (pre-SPDX-adoption) past (only by me, I think). There has been an assumption that the copyrightable forms of Fedora trademarks benefit from an implicit exception to Fedora licensing policy that gives special status to Fedora. Of course, it’s sort of logical.
Nevertheless, now that we have a more comprehensive approach to license classification, we need to revisit this issue. The fedora-logos license does not meet the relaxed approval criteria for allowed-content licenses:
Fedora may designate a license as allowed for content if it meets the criteria for allowed licenses with the following exceptions:
The license may restrict or prohibit modification
The license may say that it does not cover patents or grant any patent licenses
The fedora-logos license contains restrictions that go beyond this.
Whether it would be a good or bad idea to make a fairly dramatic change to a more permissive licensing model is beyond the scope of this issue.
Our options, in order from roughly more to less realistic, are:
- Treat the fedora-logos license as not allowed, and state an exception permitting its use in the fedora-logos package, in keeping with tradition.
- Relax the allowed-content criteria further to permit licenses with these characteristics, including licenses not specific to Fedora (or Red Hat, which owns the Fedora trademark).
- Relax the allowed-content criteria more narrowly in a way that specifically benefits Fedora logo licensing.
- Create a new license approval category (as a placeholder call it “nonfree”) – in a previous issue I asserted that this could only be done by the Fedora Council.
- Revise the fedora-logos license to make it fall within allowed-content. This would among other things require consultation with Red Hat trademark counsel.
My inclination is to go with option 1. This codifies historical practice and tolerably addresses the inconsistency with Fedora licensing philosophy.
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I know I’m mostly just a ghost in this space these days, but I would strongly caution against choosing a license which permits modification on the Fedora trademarks. This is a key area where the intersection of copyright and trademark can put the trademark at risk and lead to encouraging use of the Fedora marks in situations that the project probably does not want.
I strongly encourage the council to treat this as a corner case, as described in option 1 by Richard.
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Thanks @spot!
I think the approach we should take now is:
- Explicitly approve the corner-case exception. I don’t even think this really needs a Council vote, as it isn’t a change — simply recording long-standing practice and defacto policy. Richard and Jillayne should just document it so it’s explicit rather than implicit.
- Dismiss relaxing our rules or creating a nonfree category; I think that would cause essential brand confusion, never mind the legal aspect.
- If someone strongly believes that re-licensing is the right thing for Fedora to do, treat that as separate issue. And then I can ask Red Hat Legal what they think of CC0.
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