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Introducing openSUSE Trademark Guidelines
(6 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)
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This took a bit longer than we’d have liked, but we are now ready to unleash the openSUSE Trademark Guidelines (PDF). (See openSUSE News for the official announcement.)
I’d like to thank our legal team for their work on the guidelines, and also all of the members of the community who participated in drafting, reviewing, and providing expert input. And, also, a special thanks to the community members who patiently (more or less… 
) waited for the guidelines to be finished.
One thing I want to stress: We’re putting these guidelines out because we want to encourage and simplify the use of openSUSE as a base for other projects. So, if you read the guidelines and see a problem, let us know. We expect that these will be revised at some point in the future, so feedback is welcome.
Also, the guidelines are just that: Guidelines. If you want to create your own openSUSE distro or use an openSUSE logo for something, the guidelines exist to make it simple to do that without having to get a separate agreement from our legal department to make it possible. They also explain when use of the marks is not permitted.
But, you can ask for permission to use the openSUSE marks even if you don’t fit within the permitted use case. We simply can’t grant blanket permission for all modified versions that include non-project modifications. If you have questions about using the openSUSE marks, please contact permission@novell.com.
We consulted with a number of other projects’ guidelines in drafting these. Unfortunately, there’s not a GPL of trademark guidelines — that is to say, while there are plenty of well-respected free and open source licenses for code, there isn’t a “standard” trademark policy that FOSS projects could simply re-use. That’s too bad, because I expect many projects spend quite a few man hours drafting policies and having them reviewed.
That said, we did draw from the guidelines of other projects, and have likewise made it possible to reuse ours — the openSUSE Trademark Guidelines are licensed under version 3.0 of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.
This policy is pretty restrictive. Ie I can’t link to opensuse if I have “controversial content” — very vague, ie if I have a pro-gaza post does that make it controversial?
Forbidding T-shirts with the logo to be sold – if someone can market opensuse shirts and make money, that should be a no brainer. The opensuse brand is not strong, and with the layoffs the perceived strength of the distro is almost nothing. You need to embrace everyone, any way you can to try and right this ship before it sinks. Not trying to be mean, just real.
Really, this doesn’t differ significantly from many other FOSS projects. But, if you have some input, we’d welcome it here: http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Trademark_Guidelines_use_cases. Thanks.
No surprise for a product originated from Germany. Usually if you i.e buy a needle from Germany, it will come probably with 100 pages called ‘Gebrauchsanweisung’ (Guideline of Usage) as a part of ‘Deutsche Wertarbeit’ (German Quality Assurance) that would create ‘Made in Germany’.