Yet another website? (Re: [Ambassadors] belux ambassadors meeting log 15th April 2009)

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On 05/19/2009 10:24 AM, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> Example: The guidelines (not the trademark license agreement) clearly
> state that "Never using the ® mark for Fedora, nor a trademark statement
> per the guidelines" is "unacceptable", but AFAICS we do this on most
> wiki pages.

On this specific point it is worth pointing out that in general, only
the actual holder of the trademark is permitted to use the "® mark",
which is why Red Hat does it on the official Fedora websites, but others
cannot do so.

The very nature of trademarks is one where the holder of the trademarks
has a superset of rights that they are allowed to use, but must be
careful about how those rights are granted to others or they risk
diluting (and possibly eventually losing) the marks.

Or to be blunt, Red Hat will always have the ability to do things with
the Fedora marks that others will not. In general, I feel that Red Hat
does a very good job of not misusing the Fedora marks in ways that the
community would not approve of, and have learned a lot from some of
their earlier mistakes (Fedora Directory Server being one offhand).

~spot