[darcs-users] how should we relicense the Darcs logo? (if at all)

[Max Battcher]

Ian Lynagh wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 06:43:32PM +0100, Eric Kow wrote:
>> action, we should be left with a GPL licensed logo, much
>> like the Mercurial folks:
>>   http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2008-October/021875.html
>> And that might be OK too as a fall-back most-conservative license that
>> we could relax on a case-by-case basis...
> 
> IANAL, but I believe that you are confusing copyright licensing with
> trademark licensing.
> 

At this point, I think the assumption is that _both_ are up for grabs. 
Now that we have the Oversight + Conservancy we, as the darcs community, 
have the opportunity to seek a stronger trademark and deeper control of 
when, where, and how the logo is used. That would be trademark/policy. 
On the copyright side the GPL isn't considered a good license for 
artwork, so we have the opportunity to, for instance, push it into a 
(more liberal) Creative Commons copyright license. The copyright and 
trademark/policy ultimately work hand in hand, so we might as well get 
both right.

Questions we can ask:

Is darcs a strong "brand" that deserves a strong (possibly, registered) 
trademark?

Should the logo only be used for "project-approved" reasons?

My own suggestions would be to explicitly license the CC by-sa license 
(attribution, share-alike), which honors the GPL intention of copyleft, 
but is a better well-recognized license for art.

As for trademark/policy I don't see a reason to strongly trademark the 
logo (darcs isn't Firefox) and I think the logo should be allowed to be 
used liberally under whichever copyright license is chosen, with perhaps 
only a liability disclaimer that use of the logo does not imply any 
direct relationship with darcs itself. But IANAL and even that might not 
be necessary.

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