Licensing policy clarification about logos

[Albert Astals Cid]

El dimecres, 25 de juny del 2025, a les 9:25:38 (Hora d’estiu d’Europa 
central), Ingo Klöcker va escriure:
> 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.

Logos are not code, unless we are putting them inside a qrc file I don't see 
the problem regarding distribution if we have the rights to do so (and we 
clearly mark that the are not Free).

Cheers,
  Albert

> 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