<bcc: trademarks@ for awareness>
On 10/2/2012 11:42 AM, Rob Weir wrote:
On our support website, at the bottom, we have a list of
OpenOffice-related books:
http://www.openoffice.org/support/
As you see, we have links to 3rd party pages for purchasing the books,
usually Amazon or Lulu.
I'm in the process of updating this page, as part of adding a list of
consultants, and it occurred to me that we should probably think about
how Shane's draft linking policy applies to books:
http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/linking
Good question: the above policy doesn't directly address the question of
listing pages for books; i.e. actual publishers. Even if many people
simply get the free PDF, historical branding questions have tended to be
much simpler relating to what we traditionally think of as publishers or
authors rather than "Consultants" of any kind.
In particular, traditional publishers tend to be *far* better at
respecting branding and licensing issues, both up front and if we ever
have to ask them for changes.
AOO is the first project to have a large enough ecosystem that I should
work with trademarks@ to update the policy. Having AOO think through
how you might present books would be helpful.
One way to think of it is to treat the publisher or author (for
self-published books) as the "consultant" in the terms of the policy.
They are the ones providing the service, via their book. So we would
allow linking to the author's website or the publisher's website which
describes the book. But we would not link to Amazon, since they are a
retailer, not the author or the publisher.
In principle I certainly like providing a link to the author or
publisher's actual homepage for the book. But I'd tend to allow
projects to decide: in some cases, there may not be a book homepage, and
in some cases, it might be worth simply pointing to one (or more) useful
places to directly order the book. So including an Amazon or B&N link
is fine if you want to do that. Note: it would not be a good idea to
use one of the "affiliate" links, unless it's one controlled by the PMC
(i.e. so the affiliate referrals aren't going to some third party).
Otherwise, same criteria as consultants -- factual list, respect
trademark, impartial, rel="nofollow", etc.
Yup. In AOO's case, I'd think this would be a separate page, since
there's plenty of material to list, and users would tend to think of
"find a book to read" differently than "hire a consultant to help".
Also, book listings could be persistent (presuming the URL is still
available, as Andrea notes.
Does this make sense?
-Rob
- Shane
