Licensing policy clarification about logos

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Mittwoch, 25. Juni 2025 00:23:18 Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit Nate Graham 
wrote:
> 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.

Because it doesn't apply to third-party stuff.

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

The solution some distros chose for a similar problem is to put unfree 
packages in separate repos.

If we really need to host the logos ourselves then I would put them in a 
separate unfree-stuff git repo to clearly separate them from our free stuff. We 
don't want to rewrite the history of our repos if a logo owner suddenly 
changes their mind. The next question is whether it's okay to include non-free 
logos in our products. I don't think that's compatible with the GPL, but 
IANAL. I think the best solution is to download unfree logos directly from the 
source (or from an unfree assets mirror we provide; this may even be necessary 
to avoid having to put a section about every logo owner into our data 
protection and privacy policy) during runtime and cache them locally. Our 
unfree-assets-mirror could download the unfree logos on the fly and also cache 
them. Then we wouldn't have to store any unfree logos in any repo. All we'd 
need to store is the URLs of the logos so that the assets-mirror can download 
them.

I wouldn't touch our Licensing Policy. We just have to make clear that the 
policy doesn't apply to the separate unfree-stuff repo (in case we want/need 
such a repo in the first place).

Regards,
Ingo
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