I've created a topic on Fedora Discussion for this ticket.

Please keep this ticket focused. Discuss there, and record votes and decisions here. Thanks!

@msuchy with a year after passing and the SPDX licence effort in its 4th (and final) phase, I believe I can close out this ticket as it was serving an 'fyi' purpose. Is that ok with you?

No, please do not close this. This is still not resolved.

All I need is Fedora Council statement "OK, it is free to relicense to XXX" where XXX is one of the allowed license.

Thanks @msuchy I will add it to todays council meeting agenda to see can we get this one resolved.

@ref Do you have input on this topic? I think your guidance could help us navigate the most appropriate next steps here.

This ticket is approaching its second anniversary. This does not seem to be blocking any critical work. The issue of trademark use remains a sensitive one and I believe that the time we spend in legal review is not a useful function of the Council for this particular trademark request.

I would defer this topic to a discussion on the fedora-legal mailing list and seek input from our legal experts on what they advise. At present, the Council requires Fedora Legal input and more consensus from the community on which license we should use for a new license.

Without a firm proposal in place or knowing what license that the community feels is most appropriate, there is no action needed on the part of the Fedora Council at this time. If we want to continue this discussion, I propose opening a new ticket with a clear proposal for a specific license we should re-license to.

The discussion happened at https://gitlab.com/fedora/legal/fedora-license-data/-/issues/218 which is superior to fedora-legal mailing list in this case.

Everyone is deferring the decision to the Red Hat trademark counselor (whom I notified and was ignored). I would prefer if you reopen this issue and with Fedora Council hat on, approach RH trademark counselor and find the solution.

This was discussed at today's council meeting with the following outcome:

@jasonbrooks will bring this to the attention of someone in RH Legal and will introduce @jspaleta as well to make sure this can be followed up on and a solution reached.

@msuchy does this request still require a statement from the council to the effect of ' it is free to relicense to XXX" where XXX is one of the allowed license.'? If so, this should be what is asked with RH Legal team.

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does this request still require a statement from the council...

Yes.

See recent activity in https://pagure.io/fedora-logos/pull-request/24

Person from Red Hat Legal here. The Fedora logos are of course trademarks of Red Hat and the actual manifestations of those logos are copyrighted by Red Hat. As an initial note, I am not responsible for advising on matters relating to Red Hat trademarks (there is another member of the Red Hat legal team with such responsibility).

There has been some internal discussion of the referenced pull request with our trademark counsel, but I would not say we truly have resolution. The issue is difficult because: (1) it involves two conflicting legal regimes (trademark and copyright), (2) handling of trademarks in FOSS has been non-standardized and more confused compared to copyright, and I wouldn't say there are good existing upstream licensing models to emulate, (3) Fedora has moved towards greater clarity and rationalization in how it treats package licensing issues, (4) historically, I'd say, Red Hat exhibited an unusually pointed interest in Fedora trademarks relative to counterpart trademarks arising out of other projects (by that I mean, doing things like coming up with such an elaborate license as what you see in the fedora-logos package and so forth - this probably has to do mostly with the age of Fedora and the nature of its connection to Red Hat), and (5) probably other reasons.

I think Red Hat's position is that the Fedora Council does not have authority to relicense Fedora logos (without Red Hat's permission), to the extent that's an open question here. There is a Red Hat tradition of actually delegating the details of open source/open-ish content license decisions involving FOSS project assets to the actual maintainers of those projects, but I don't think that's relevant here because the assets in question have not been treated historically as something free/open/open-ish.

I have recommended to Red Hat's trademark counsel against the proposal to replace the fedora-logos license with CC-BY-ND (or maybe more accurately "CC-BY-ND when read in conjunction with the Fedora trademark policy"), despite the fact that I was I think the first person to suggest this as a possible outcome. The reasons:

• I am not aware of any precedent where a community FOSS project has used CC-BY-ND as a logo license for the project's trademarks

• I don't think Fedora and Red Hat are prepared to publicly justify such a groundbreaking move, which I think would likely be publicly questioned

• CC-BY-ND is superficially appealing because of the connection to Creative Commons and especially because CC-BY-ND (in its various versions) is already classified as allowed-content in Fedora, logo files being a form of "content". However, when you think about it further, CC-BY-ND isn't really such an amazing license. We allow it for "content" for pragmatic and historical reasons, not because we think the license somehow represents enlightened policy.

• It's not clear that relicensing to CC-BY-ND solves the problem of the license being not-allowed in the Fedora classification scheme, because arguably the real license is CC-BY-ND plus the trademark policy.

Currently, I don't see any way around the fact that fedora-logos is likely to have some sort of restricted use license (whether the current one or a replacement with possible improvements) that just doesn't fit in with the Fedora license classification scheme. We could revise that scheme to add a category for certain acceptable sorts of restricted use logos ("allowed-logos") (not altogether different from how Fedora accepts various highly restrictive licenses in the allowed-firmware category). I'm not sure there are enough such licenses to justify such a category, and I myself feel that we should not have a license policy that gives special privileges to Fedora.

It is worth looking at whether there are upstream approaches that Fedora could emulate. This might at least involve making the fedora-logos license more community-friendly on a stylistic level. Fedora could also look at Debian's approach to logo licensing, which I believe involves having a logotype license and a non-logotype license, with the logotype logo under a custom restricted use license and the non-logotype logo under a libre license, but I'm not sure how beneficial it would be for Fedora to be seen as copying what Debian does.

I am not aware of any precedent where a community FOSS project has used CC-BY-ND as a logo license for the project's trademarks

https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/debian-astro-logo
GPLv3+
https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/linuxlogo
GPLv2+
https://packages.ubuntu.com/kinetic/plymouth-theme-xubuntu-logo
CC-BY-SA-3.0 AND GPLv3+ AND GPLv2+
SUSE https://github.com/openSUSE/artwork/
CC-BY-SA 3.0

(taken from https://gitlab.com/fedora/legal/fedora-license-data/-/issues/218 )

To be clear, the openSUSE artwork repository being CC-BY-SA does not mean that the actual project logo is not restricted.

openSUSE trademarks: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Trademark_guidelines