Subject: Re: Fedora: Freedom is a Feature. - msg#00051

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Re: Fedora: Freedom is a Feature.

Nicu Buculei wrote: What we should to to "protect": when we go live with the slogan for the first time we should do *a lot* of noise about it, not just put quietly a new banner on the site. any ideas on how to promote it? this is kind of what i was thinking altho, heh, i was too lazy to gimp the photo up to make it more suitable for the text otherwise it'd be bigger and positioned a bit more nicely: http://duffy.fedorapeople.org/temp/freedom-slogan.png Photo is 'Explosion of Light Across the Sky' by Dean Souglass and is CC Attribution 2.0: http://www.flickr.com/photos/deansouglass/1111243853/ (another one that looked nice to use, http://www.flickr.com/photos/75325073@N00/1100273086) ~m -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list

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Re: Fedora: Freedom is a Feature.

On Fri, 5 Oct 2007, Matthew Miller wrote: Maybe we could leave off the TM but include somewhere some lighthearted fine print about it being a trademark irony notwithstanding and we know that sounds silly but hey, gotta use the law to protect freedom too. I'm too tired to be really witty right now but maybe someone else can pick up from there. :) Maybe. Let me be honest about another motivation: my suspicions about the general usefulness of "protecting the marks" of open source projects. I admire the Debian practice of having some marks that are fiercely protected, and other marks that are completely open. The Debian swirl is completely open; the Debian swirl atop the genie bottle is fiercely protected. Which has allowed the open Debian mark to proliferate. I'd hoped to get this kind of agreement with Red Hat legal in regards to the Fedora mark -- i.e. create an open Fedora mark that anyone could use in any way they wished -- but was unsuccessful. As a consequence, Fedora must now take a very aggressive stance on mark usage, which takes up legal time and resources that could, IMHO, be *much* better spent elsewhere. It also leads to long and confusing Board-level discussions about "who is entitled to use the Fedora mark and when," in all kinds of areas: respins, derivative works, ambassador collateral, etc., etc. There are some pretty long and protracted debates about The Value of Marks to the open source community. The OSI's aggressive enforcement of their Open Source mark certainly hasn't prevented the Enemies of Open Source from co-opting and confusing the Open Source mark, for instance. --g -- Greg DeKoenigsberg Community Development Manager Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255 "To whomsoever much hath been given... ...from him much shall be asked" -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list

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Re: Fedora: Freedom is a Feature.

On Fri, Oct 05, 2007 at 11:46:57AM -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote: > >Or are you just remarking on the perceived irony of a phrase containing > >the word "freedom" being considered a form of intellectual property? > This point exactly. With other slogans, I'd be less concerned. With this > slogan, the idea of protecting the mark gives me some pretty serious > heartburn. Maybe we could leave off the TM but include somewhere some lighthearted fine print about it being a trademark irony notwithstanding and we know that sounds silly but hey, gotta use the law to protect freedom too. I'm too tired to be really witty right now but maybe someone else can pick up from there. :) -- Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://mattdm.org/> Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/> -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list

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Re: Fedora: Freedom is a Feature.

On Fri, Oct 05, 2007 at 12:08:55PM -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote: > while the slogan is a pretty nice statement of a defining quality of > fedora - omfg will the world end if someone else uses it? > > e.g., if $DISTRO starts using it AND actually backs it by you know, not > shipping patent-infringing codecs in their distro... well isn't that > what we WANT? you know, others to follow our lead? and, if they pick up > the slogan and continue to produce a not entirely free distro, well they > just look stupid then! :) I guess my initial comment regarding trademark was spurred by seeing the phrase used in conjunction with the logo in your mock-up, Mo. It looked really good. They looked like they *belonged* together. I instantly foresaw them being linked together in a myriad of contexts all over the Fedora multiverse. In such a scenario, where the slogan and the logo are closely linked, it felt natural that the phrase would be serving a very similar role to that of the logo itself, and thus they should be treated similarly. That was my leap in thinking. It doesn't necessarily need to be done that way. If we continue to use only the logo in a really trademarky way, and we just throw this phrase around as a marketing slogan wherever it feels like it fits, then I agree that it needn't be treated as a trademark any more than any other catch phrases we repeatedly say in our Fedora evangelism. But if we do end up using it closely linked with the logo, and we're using it as a mark of Fedora's identity, then yeah, I think it needs to be treated as such. For now, I think it's safe to set the issue a bit to the side, and wait and see how and if we actually end up using the thing. But we should maybe at least make a mental note of when we're using it in conjunction with identity marks such as the logo, and if it seems like we're doing that more often than not, I think it's something we should readdress. cheers, - Paul -- Paul Stauffer <paulds@xxxxxx> Manager of Research Computing Computer Science Department Boston University -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list