[Marketing] [SLOBS] [SLOBs] Scenarios for licensing our trademarks

[Chris Ball]

Hi Sean,

   > That works fine with honest folk, but what about the company that
   > wishes to use the marks aggressively, as a selling point, without
   > providing any support? Or the person who promises to respect GPL
   > and CC licenses, then turns around and adds Flash binaries to a
   > Sugar image?

I thought I addressed both of these in an earlier post.  Quoting:

   For example, "you can use the mark without permission as long as
   your product does not contain proprietary software" is a fine way
   to control that particular condition, if we wanted to, and
   similarly "if you are including extra software, you should
   prominently advertise that Sugar Labs does not provide support
   for your product, and give your own contact details for support
   instead" works for support.

If either situation happened, the automatic trademark license would
be rescinded, because its conditions would no longer be being met.
Do you see a problem with this?

   > Or the guy who claims he sent in an e-mail and never
   > did, uses the marks and tells the press we never answer our
   > e-mail?

We could setup a bot on automatic-trademarks at sugarlabs.org that
replies to applications with an ID number; if you don't get one,
you definitely don't have a trademark license yet.

In short:  I'm hearing that you've thought of constraints and
concluded that an automatic trademark license must be unworkable, but
I don't share that intuition, so I'd like to examine those constraints
to see whether they really do lead to the conclusion of a manual
license being necessary.

Thanks,

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child