#386 Logo fonts and trademarks
Closed: resolved 2 years ago by mattdm. Opened 2 years ago by mattdm.

Up until now, we've had a policy where the vector versions of official Fedora logos are only available through an email queue responded to by a human. This is both a hurdle to people getting and using correct versions of the logo and a big time-sink for humans (i.e. @duffy) who could be doing more awesome and interesting things.

We have permission from RH Legal as trademark holders to instead offer a download page similar to https://mozilla.design/firefox/logos-usage/, with some prepared text.

However, there's a case that doesn't cover. There exist several popular logo collections provided in the form of fonts; one of these is Font Awesome — which we even package in Fedora Linux.

This font, as do several others like Simple Icons, include logos for popular Linux distributions. It's generally good for us to be included in these — people want to be able to identify the project or our distro, and since inclusion is by popular demand, it helps reinforce our position as one of the "defacto default" Linux distro leaders.

But, they have a problem: as fonts are two-color, our old logo was impossible to properly include. Unfortunately, the various collections have attempted to address this by making unauthorized interpretative versions. The new logo was, in part, designed to help solve this problem, and since we have that now, I'd like to tell them to use it.

But, of course, people using the the font won't see our download page. Therefore, I have the following okayed-by-legal text I plan to send them:


The Fedora Council grants permission for a version of the official Fedora logo to be included in your collection of icons, unmodified from the logo image we are providing here except in size and/or file format, provided you include this text, the legal notice below, and a link to https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/brand/ in any relevant accompanying documentation and websites. Please do not create modified versions of the logo, even to match a style or theme.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT FOR LOGO USE:

The "Fedora" logo provided as part of this collection is a trademark of Red Hat, Inc. and is provided solely for use to accurately identify Fedora or its products. To use this logo, you must agree to only use the logo in compliance with the Fedora Trademark Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Trademark_guidelines, and never to use any logo or trademark of Red Hat in a manner that suggests that Red Hat or Fedora owns, sponsors, or endorses your products or services, or that you own any rights in the logo or trademark.


Does anyone have any objection to this? I feel like the bad "logo" has been out there so long that I'd really like to get this fixed as soon as possible.


Font Awesome is in "beta" for version 6 of their font, and I'd really like this to be fixed before that ships. So on the one hand, this isn't, like, a sudden fire — but, there's also a window that we may miss. (They do make updates, but many people are likely to just take one version freeze it forever.)

Okay, since there's no objections, and since this is something we agreed to in spirit at a Council meeting a while ago, I'm going to send this off as we close up 2021!

Metadata Update from @mattdm:
- Issue close_status updated to: resolved
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)

2 years ago

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