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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