Licensing policy clarification about logos

Nate Graham nate at kde.org
Tue Jun 24 23:23:18 BST 2025


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.

What's the right way to add a 3rd-party logo, assuming we have the 
permission of the logo's copyright or trademark holder?

This came up specifically in 
https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/knewstuff/-/merge_requests/361#note_1245687

Thanks folks!


Nate


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