[Fedora-spins] Of test spins and trademarks

[Paul W. Frields]

Sorry, arriving late to email today.

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 02:56:15PM +0200, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:00:53 -0500, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 15:41:36 -0600,
> >   Kevin Fenzi <kevin at tummy.com> wrote:
> >> 
> >> 1. Is the approval I got a while back for the Xfce spin "good for
> >> life" ? Or does it have some expiration date on it? 
> > 
> > There is supposed to be a recurring spins process, but it isn't
> documented
> > yet.
> > 
> 
> Off the record, since yes, it is not documented (very well or at all);
> 
> - all previously approved spins (for Fedora N) go back to status
> "Incomplete" or "Development" after Fedora N's General Availability and for
> the development cycle of Fedora N+1
> 
> - formally, the spin goes through the entire process again, including
> "Review by Spins SIG" and including "Trademark approval by Board"
> 
> - informally, this means that the board would not need to (re-)approve a
> spin's trademark usage, if there's not at all that many changes -after all,
> it's mostly tweaking the spin a little further, implementing new features
> in the development cycle of Fedora N+1, etc, rather then rebuilding the
> spin from the ground up and doing all kinds of nasty changes.
>
> Now, what is considered a major change or what is considered "too many
> changes" in order for the recurring trademark approval to need to pass the
> board once more, is not set in stone. The Spins SIG obviously has a policy
> of "when in doubt, ask board".

And that seems completely reasonable to me.

> As an example, we have the Electronic Labs spin; it's changing it's base
> desktop environment from KDE to GNOME (by means of including the
> -desktop.ks instead of the -kde.ks).
> 
> The Spins SIG at this moment considers this a major change, but since the
> basis of the change is still an approved and "permanent" spin, we don't
> expect the board to require (re-)approval of the spin's trademark usage.
> 
> Does this make sense and if so, does it make sense to document it as such?
> 
> If not, what are we overlooking?

Yes to both.

> >> 3. When changes are made to the spin kickstart, do I need to ask the
> >> Board to vet and review them and reapprove the 'new' spin? 
> 
> I guess the above (or the answers to the above) would also (partly) answer
> this question.

As you noted Jeroen, there isn't a hard and fast rule because we think
the Spins SIG has the ability to discern what's a major (or arguably
major) change.  The Board retains the responsibility of approving
trademark usage, and could require a resubmission when deemed
necessary.  But in most cases questions can be resolved here fairly
quickly.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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