Agree on a trademark policy

[thufschmitt]

Follow-up to #14

For the registered trademark to really be useful, we should collectively agree on a trademark policy for enforcing it.

Started some investigation on https://nixos-foundation.notion.site/Policy-5c5b2d0dbce141689dcc6f6fb49f3d64. Once I get enough understanding of the design space, I'll open a PR here with a draft proposal so that we can discuss it more widely.

[thufschmitt]

A few things to take into account in the policy:

• How permissive do we want to be wrt the general usage of the name (are 3d-party open-source projects allowed to use the name Nix(OS)? Are proprietary projects allowed? What about company/non-profit names?)
  • Debian for instance is very protective here (“You cannot use Debian trademarks in a company or organization name or as the name of a product or service.”) while python (and a few others like Rust who took inspiration on the python policy) are much more permissive.
• How permissive do we want to be on modified versions of the logo/brand name?
  • Python has a large section describing what is (or not) allowed wrt the logo. Likewise, the OSI has a whole page dedicated to this. On the other hand, the Rust policy is pretty much “do whatever you want as long as you’re not harming the brand or looking like you’re an official Rust project”.
  • The OSI trademark policy has a fairly detailed section as to how to use the trademark. Likewise for the Linux Foundation. Others just don’t.
• How precise do we want the policy to be?
  • The Model Trademark Guidelines template is very long and tries to detail every possible use of the mark. Others like python only try to explicitly cover the most common and unambiguous permitted and forbidden cases, with an “ask us for everything else” clause.

Besides that, it’d probably be good to start from an existing policy to avoid us a lot of painful work. The Python one is a fairly widely copied one and could be a good start. Or the Rust one which seems to be for the most part a trimmed down version of the Python one (and might be what we want depending on how permissive we choose to be)

[zimbatm]

Companies and commercial projects should not use Nix or NixOS in their names or branding. It creates a situation where some companies could be considered more legitimate than others and somehow endorsed by the NixOS project. Typically companies might also want to register their trademarks, causing even more issues down the line. Having too much overlap in the namespace is also confusing to consumers.

For open-source projects, there is a utility argument. If you want to create a tool that extends Nix or NixOS in some ways, having it part of their name makes sense. We also want to avoid chasing after some random Github repos.

[grahamc]

It'll be important that the policy is clear on using the name and mark on open source projects which are chiefly produced by a company. Another factor is the use of the name and mark in advertising products and services. For a couple of examples, https://nix-bazel.build/ and the original design of https://zero-to-nix.com/.

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/pre-rfc-a-single-canonical-domain-name/35102/15