[darcs-users] Acceptable use of the darcs logo

[Max Battcher]

Trent W. Buck wrote:
> Ashley Moran <ashley.moran at patchspace.co.uk> writes:
>> I would just like to know [...] what the restrictions on the darcs
>> logo (http://www.darcs.net/logos/logo.png) are?
> 
> Good question!
> 
> I believe an professional graphic designer put it together some time
> ago, using photoshop.  It would be a good thing if the master
> (presumably a .psd or .ai) was in the repo, and if both it and the PNG
> export had clear copyright and license declarations.  Ideally
> declarations would be done in metadata (e.g. RDF) in the files
> themselves.

I was under the impression that the Inkscape SVG (./doc/logos/logo.svg) 
is the master (or at least has been used in that capacity for years). It 
doesn't have any of the Dublin Core/Creative Commons XML tags that 
Inkscape displays in the "Document Metadata" pane. It also does not 
appear to have any noticeable XML comments in the document to provide 
such information either. Revision history does not reveal much of 
interest, either:

Changes to doc/logos/logo.svg:

Thu Oct  4 16:30:25 EDT 2007  David Roundy <droundy at darcs.net>
   * add svg logo.

Wikipedia licensing attributes a PNG to the GPL of the project:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Darcs-logo.png

The only useful reference to the logo I found in dredging through the 
mailing list is from Juliusz:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/9577

(It's a paragraph towards the end of the long email and ends with a 
"Thanks, Mark!".)

I thought that I had remembered David Roundy saying something about the 
logo being public domain, but I may be misremembering and couldn't 
source any comments to that nature in my quick search. It's more likely 
that David Roundy expected it to follow the terms of the GPL (albeit 
there is certainly a lot of legal grey area on whether or not the GPL 
applies to an image.)

At the very least it is doubtful that David holds any sort of trademark 
on the logo. We can be certain that the "project itself" holds no such 
trademark, as the foundations to even consider such an action has only 
recently come into place...

It can be seen that the logo has been used fairly liberally by any and 
all that seek to use it with little complaint thus far by anyone involved.

All of which is to say, *I* think it is acceptable for Ashley to use the 
logo for his slides. There is precedent for it. However, it does not 
seem that there is an explicit policy anywhere and we should probably 
correct that. (I don't recommend attacking that problem to the extent 
that the Mozilla Foundation has embroiled themselves, however.)

--
--Max Battcher--
http://worldmaker.net