Trademark license agreement status

[Richard Körber]

> As I mentioned, I was checking with some colleagues on their thoughts
> about whether it was problematic to ask for trademark symbols to be
> used. Unfortunately no one had a clear answer.  In light of the
> uncertainty, I would recommend to Fedora that the Trademark Guidelines
> and the TLA (In Exhibit C) both be amended to state (borrowing the Sun
> approach), "The '®' symbol should be placed after the first or most
> prominent use of the FEDORA Mark and the 'TM' should appear after the
> first or most prominent use of the Infinity design logo unless your
> editorial convention is never to use symbols with any company's marks,
> including your own."  Therefore, if you aren't doing it for anyone else
> you don't have to do it for Fedora.  Note that Fedora still asks that
> the trademark legend ("Fedora and the Infinity design logo are
> trademarks of Red Hat, Inc.") be included, but that can be on the
> imprint page.

Well, our conversation ended quite abruptly when Paul announced the new
draft where the "Permitted Use" was still unchanged. It seemed like
there was no way to address my concerns at that issue.

Anyhow, I think this will be good news for the other German Fedora sites.

> The mirroring issue has been addressed with a change to the contract,
> available in draft here:

AFAIK Robert Scheck was having the mirroring issue.

> Are there any other outstanding issues?  I looked through the emails and
> believe they've all been addressed.  Is there something I missed?

There aren't, at least for me. Knowingly breaching the Trademark
Guidelines was what concerned me most. As I posted somewhere in a thread
before, I think it is careless to sign a contract in the hope that parts
of it will never be applied.

> Richard, I'm sorry to hear that we haven't yet been able to satisfy all
> your concerns and I hope you can clarify for me any additional issues
> that are still problematic for you.  Your help has been invaluable in
> this process and I believe we have a much better agreement because of it.

Thanks, this is good to know. There were no further comments from the
other people in Christoph's thread, so I felt like I was finally making
a complete idiot out of myself.

You know that I ran the site non-commercially and that I write the
articles in my spare time. The last days I was mostly thinking about the
TLA, the implications they might cause, if I am worrying too much or
being too careless, and all that. Those thoughts kept me awake at night.
And they kept me from writing.

I want to bring back the fun in writing articles, as it was before. If
it means giving up the site in order to get rid of all that legal stuff,
then it's the price I'll have to pay.

-- 
Richard