search

opensourcepledge / opensourcepledge.com

We all depend on Open Source. Pay the maintainers by joining the Open Source Pledge.
https://opensourcepledge.com/
195 stars 29 forks source link

Determine license for creative assets #223

Open dcramer opened 2 hours ago

dcramer commented 2 hours ago

We want to contribute assets to the Open Source Pledge and have those be usable in a variety of purposes, very similar to trademark purposes. Normally we'd just donate things under an open source license, but with media its actually more tricky than that. One example of what we want to avoid is someone taking the assets, uploading them to stockphoto, and trying to sell them. We also want to avoid people taking the assets and using them to represent something that is not the pledge. I'm not familiar w/ media licensing so don't have any particular idea here, but it might be we just retain full IP and give a list of allowed purposes, in which we will implicitly grant a license.

vladh commented 2 hours ago

I think a simple solution might be to trademark both the word mark (“Open Source Pledge”) and the figurative mark (the logo), and then to allow these to be used only when adhering to trademark guidelines. OSI does this for their logo:

My understanding is that, in this situation, the logo is not permissively licensed, and one good reason for that seems to be preventing derivatives, which I think makes sense for a logo.

Delta456 commented 1 hour ago

I mostly agree with @vladh here.

we want to avoid is someone taking the assets, uploading them to stockphoto, and trying to sell them

I feel that should be fine because not everyone can purchase at the same disparity in terms of purchasing.

I think the Go Brand Guidelines make this clear

Swag should never be advertised as “official” swag or swag endorsed for use or purchase by the Go programming language project.

There are no other restrictions on generating revenue through swag that use the Go Trademarks. However, we encourage sellers to consider the ethos of the open source movement in this decision. Sellers must truthfully advertise to consumers how much of the selling price, if any, will be donated to open source or community efforts.

There are many more points in https://go.dev/brand which can help to learn how we can go forward with this.