[SoaS] Protecting our trademark without discouraging potential partners

[Bernie Innocenti]

Hola Sean!

Today I did not reply to your last comments on #sugar-meeting:

 <SeanDaly> bernie: i'm concerned too about some Asian OEM taking
 our marks and starting a parallel project with the marks, but
 totally different SW
 <SeanDaly> the GPL succeeded because was nearly bulletproof - only
 TiVo poked a hole
 <SeanDaly> you think i'm cautious, you should have seen rms and
 Eben Moglen - watch my films here:
 http://www.fsfe.org/projects/gplv3/europe-gplv3-conference.en.html#materials


Your concerns are important to me too. I 100% agree that we should have
legal defense measures in place for the time when we'll actually
need them.

My other concern is (was) that we may shy away many valuable
contributors in the process of establishing effective protections.

Hopefully, we can achieve *both* goals if hide the actual legal
mumbo-jumbo behind good communication of our moral intent. Ubuntu is an
example of how this could be achieved. Actually, in some cases they were
even able to merge the ethical and legal sides into one human-readable
text:

 https://edge.launchpad.net/codeofconduct/1.1

This is a Contributor License Agreement rather than a Trademark policy,
but you get the idea. The legal protection is probably the same, but it
doesn't piss off contributors as much as a full blown contract full of
weird clauses.

At least, I remember myself being seriously annoyed when I had to sign
the FSF copyright assignment and the Fedora CLA. But not at all when I
signed the Ubuntu Code of Conduct... It's easy to see why by comparing
the contracts.

This was just to explain my motivation... I think our current compromise
is a good one: explain our motivation and spirit in the preamble of the
TM policy, clearly invite anyone interested to apply for a license, and
make the procedure for approving requests as streamlined and quick as
possible.

Mel and I agreed on some specific wording on irc after you had dropped
off. I think she's going to update the draft in the wiki so next week we
can bring them up as motions in the next slobs meeting.

Cheers from Paraguay!

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/