Update fgo licensing page with new content
Submitted by Brian Cameron
Assigned to Wiki maintainers
Link to original bug (#644932)
Description
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
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
Can these changes be made?
Thanks,
Brian
Version: current