Next week’s openSUSE Project meeting should be fairly substantial. If you can make it, please do! The meeting will be at 17:00 UTC on #opensuse-project on Freenode. The agenda is here, feel free to add to it if there’s something we should discuss. (As if the topics on the agenda already weren’t enough!)

A lot of good feedback so far on the newly minted trademark policy. Thanks to all the community folks who’ve responded so far and made comments.

As we mentioned when the guidelines were announced, we expect to revise the guidelines after seeing what sorts of uses people want to make of the marks and find out what needs to change.

I’ve put up the guidelines on the wiki here and added another page here to start work on the next iteration of the guidelines.

We’ve also started a page here to outline areas where the guidelines are either unclear, too restrictive, not restrictive enough, or cases where we should have a registered trademark and we don’t.  If you’re interested in revising the policy, feel free to head over to the wiki and provide your input! (Feel free to discuss in the comments or on the mailing lists, but we can’t promise that all input not on the wiki will be considered.)

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.