Dne pondělí 3. června 2019 11:45:58 CEST, Richard Brown napsal(a):
On Mon, 3 Jun 2019 at 11:34, John Salvatore Fontanelli <commel@gmail.com> wrote:
SUSE owns the trademark and the names and as holder they can allow "us" the use of the name.
While this is true, as openSUSE transitions to having it's own legal entity, you should consider the possibility that such a grant of trademark use could have significantly limiting strings attached. Even without a legal entity, openSUSE already operates with significant constraints around the use of its name, which you can see in our Trademark Policy [1] and the examples I gave in my post. If openSUSE keeps its current name, I would be absolutely shocked if we manage the form the Foundation under the name "openSUSE" without significant additional restrictions atop of the status quo. And when considering situations like that we've had with openSUSE Indonesia, and other regional openSUSE groups already, this is an area where any additional restrictions are likely to cause significant additional pain for the community. Such additional restrictions might be acceptable to the community as a whole as a cost of keeping the name, but it should be an informed decision, not fed by wishful thinking that are unlikely to be legally viable (even if emotionally I'm convinced we'd all like things to be as liberal as possible, SUSE and openSUSE).
I don't do the adminstrative job, but IMHO this is acceptable price. If You have foundation, You also need to take care about the trademark and so on, don't You?
It's also worth considering that a huge amount of the Board's time is currently spend dealing with requests to use the openSUSE Trademarks, requiring what feels often like endless discussions and negotiations between interested parties and SUSE. We often can't share many of these details in our public minutes, but there have been times when the Board have had little time to deal with anything else, to the detriment of the Project as a whole. Having the Project operating under it's own mark would bring an additional benefit of significantly liberating the Board to take care of other matters with their limited voluntary time.
I'm not "insider" here, so I probably miss something, but I don't see this. The Board would also handle all the request. Or not?
[1] https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Trademark_guidelines -- Vojtěch Zeisek
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