On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 04:55:03PM +0000, Johan Sundstr�m (Achtung Liebe!) @ Pike (-) developers forum wrote:

Odd; I never seemed to have posted this, when the topic was fresh:

well, this kind of topic never goes stale. and the original motivation (to clarify the license for the wikipedia article and other uses) is also still valid.

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i would also like to clarify the license of the logo images on http://pike.ida.liu.se/download/logotype/

i believe there is no problem with making them gpl or mpl since they are protected by a trademark anyways.

Have you ever seen a project whose identity material is GPL? (Not a rhethorical question, mind you; I just find it very hard to picture, so I ask from curiosity -- examples would be of interest to me.)

the debian logo has two versions: http://www.debian.org/logos/

one with very restricted use (more restriced than the current pike logo) and one for open use.

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From my point of view, making identity stuff like logos free for

anyone to reuse for their own purposes in any way is saying "we don't mind anyone (ab)using pike logos et cetera to give stuff like malware, spam senders and other treacherous software some of our good name and credibility".

well, no, because even if the logo source (the svg, eps or whatever file) is under the gpl, the fact that the logo is trademarked should still prevent the above case.

if i make my own version of the pike logo, then i own the copyright of that and i still can do with it what i want, except, because my version looks similar the original, the trademark on the logo prevents me from exercising my copyright to its full extent. (i can not use my logo in a way that would make it represent different software, but i could use it to represent washing powder. i could not use the original logo currently because of the copyright, but the buyer of the washing powder that would not really matter)

As I understand free licenses, the point is to allow anyone to fork it and let the code live on under new maintainership, without any prior agreements with anyone, granted that the new regime makes up their own name and brand for the fork, so the old project can keep running its operation just as usual, and the two projects can even compete and be on friendly terms with one another, without seeding confusion about what is what.

i am not asking to use the pike logo for a fork of pike, but to represent it in a wikipedia article. for that it is not necesary to have it under a public license, however it would at least be nice if the current license could be clarified.

greetings, martin.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gotpike.png what is missing is the actual copyright information on the logo. i could not find that on the pike site.

a simple page that clarifies that the pike logo is copyright by ida, all rights reserved (to make clear that it is not gpl like pike itself) would already be enough.

for more details we probably need to ask a wikipedia expert.

as for the actual license of the logo, we should consider pike icons in the source distribution which should be gpl.

my suggestion to make the logofiles itself gpl was mostly for simplicity, to not have to bother with a seperate license.

greetings, martin.

The point does indeed sound moot in the case of Pike. (My question was without me realizing it considering the case of projects that have not gone as far as trademarking -- and attempting to use license means for protecting their identity from dilution. Kind of an academic issue for us, though.)