On pon, Jun 3, 2019 at 8:06 PM, Sébastien 'sogal' Poher
Le lundi 03 juin 2019 à 02:17:46, Richard Brown a écrit :
On Mon, 3 Jun 2019 at 13:53, Sébastien 'sogal' Poher
wrote: What I like to know is if the issues with the trademark can be overcome or not. I do understand that it will be limitating at so point, but what consequences are we to expect ?
My expectation would be that if we do not change the name, an "openSUSE Foundation" would likely face much stricter restrictions on what it can use the openSUSE Trademark for, and stricter limitations on allowing other people or organisations to use the trademark. [...]
So, taking that as an example, my expectation would be that if we go down this road of having a Foundation without a rename, we could end up in a very similar situation to ownCloud.
The openSUSE Project could lose the current influence that it enjoys regarding the use of its trademark due to the unique nature of the openSUSE Board simultaneously being representative of the community and the company. This unique legal duplicity (where the Board can be seen to be 'part of SUSE'..at least through my role) will not be the case under an openSUSE Foundation. Even with all plans ensuring SUSE will retains influence and a close relationship over the Foundation, for all legal matters regarding Trademarks and such, I am almost 100% certain the entities will NEED to be considered separately, leading to the comparative reduction in community influence over the openSUSE Marks compared to the status quo.
The removal of the communities influence regarding the Project's Trademark is a situation I personally would find very distasteful, which is why I outright reject Sarah's suggestion that ownCloud is an example we should aim to emulate in this case.
They stand as a good example of a 'worst case'..the sort of worst case we'd be able to avoid by renaming the Project.
Thank you for this input and the analysis of the ownCloud example. Maybe the ownCloud example is not the only possible solution. Is there no such thing as "trademark delegation", where SUSE still owns the name but delegate us the right to use as we please ?
In __any__ case, be it with SUSE signing a contract with us for use SUSE part of openSUSE or letting us use openSUSE, but them still owning the trademark, if they go down, we go down with them. There is no way around this part. There is a chance of them giving us some sovereignty with signing a contract to use SUSE as part of the brand name, but it's a patch, not a fix, their branch changes too much: we need to remake the patch from scratch.
If not I think that it is the unique opportunity that this project will have to make such a big change (I'm talking about the name change here). That would be a pity to do a lot of work to set up a foundation in order to gain more independance and, in a few years, to be blocked in some projects we may have in the future "just" because of a trademark issue.
I would call this "the only" opportunity, we have very slim chance of getting name change in an established foundation, with established trademark, which will cost additional money, which foundation won't have out of nowhere. This kind of discussion really needs to happen before anything is set in stone.
As some participants to this thread said, a lot of people are confused (or keep on confusing themselves) between the names SUSE and openSUSE, some of them even think that "it is the same". Having our own, different name may help us to that regard.
But changing the name will require a huge amount of work, in all the aspects of the project. Do we have the manpower it requires ?
Change wouldn't have to be instant obviously, and nothing wouldn't need to be backported, because there is no point. After the codebase is dead, it's dead, so the most we would have to sign with SUSE would be an agreement to continue using the name until our current distributions (or the entire Leap 15 series) are EOL. That's ~2 years to rebrand (if we reach the conclusion quickly at least). Whatever the conclusion ends up being, I will just have more work to do in artwork/branding repositories, and I don't mind this at all (I will have to work on logos/colours/fonts etc anyway ;) LCP [Stasiek] https://lcp.world -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org