On Mittwoch, 25. Juni 2025 00:23:18 Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit Nate Graham wrote: > Hello KDE community! Today I'd like to ask for some guidance regarding > KDE's licensing guidelines, and specifically how it pertains to > 3rd-party logos. > > https://community.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy mentions "Media > files", but logos don't neatly fit into this category, as they are > unlikely to be licensed as permissively as required there. However they > commonly have "brand guidelines" style web pages (for example > https://www.qt.io/brand/group/logo) and are therefore implicitly okay > with people like us using them as long as we follow the guidelines. We > can also get the owners' permission if they don't have such brand > guidelines. > > However https://community.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy makes no > mention of this topic.
Because it doesn't apply to third-party stuff. > What's the right way to add a 3rd-party logo, assuming we have the > permission of the logo's copyright or trademark holder? The solution some distros chose for a similar problem is to put unfree packages in separate repos. If we really need to host the logos ourselves then I would put them in a separate unfree-stuff git repo to clearly separate them from our free stuff. We don't want to rewrite the history of our repos if a logo owner suddenly changes their mind. The next question is whether it's okay to include non-free logos in our products. I don't think that's compatible with the GPL, but IANAL. I think the best solution is to download unfree logos directly from the source (or from an unfree assets mirror we provide; this may even be necessary to avoid having to put a section about every logo owner into our data protection and privacy policy) during runtime and cache them locally. Our unfree-assets-mirror could download the unfree logos on the fly and also cache them. Then we wouldn't have to store any unfree logos in any repo. All we'd need to store is the URLs of the logos so that the assets-mirror can download them. I wouldn't touch our Licensing Policy. We just have to make clear that the policy doesn't apply to the separate unfree-stuff repo (in case we want/need such a repo in the first place). Regards, Ingo
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
