Draft Version 0.0.1

Introduction

This document, the "Policy," outlines our policy for the use of our trademarks. While our software is available under a free and open source license, a copyright license does not include an implied right or license to use a trademark. Trademarks provide assurance about the quality of the products or services with which the trademark is associated. But, because the open source license allows your unrestricted modification of the copyrighted software, we cannot be sure that your modifications to the software are ones that will not be misleading if distributed under the same name. Instead, this Policy describes the circumstances under which you may use our trademarks. In this Policy we are not trying to limit the lawful use of our trademarks, but rather describe for your what we consider to be lawful uses. Trademark law can be ambiguous, so we hope to provide some insight into where we believe the lines are.

Objective of the trademark policy

We want to encourage and facilitate the use of our trademarks by the community, but do so in a way that still ensure that the trademarks are meaningful as a source and quality indicator for our software and the associated goods and services; that the trademarks are not used in a way that creates confusion about the true origin of software or the related goods and services; and that the trademarks continue to embody the high reputation of the software and the community associated with it. This Policy therefore tries to strike the proper balance between: 1) our need to ensure that our trademarks remain reliable indicators of the qualities that they are meant to preserve and 2) our community members' desire to be full participants in the project, accurately describe their own relationship to the project and to the software, and discuss the project.

What trademark law is about

The sections that follow describe what trademarks are covered by these Guidelines, as well as uses of the trademarks that are allowed without additional permission from us. If you want to use our trademarks in ways that are not described in this Policy, please contact us at [insert means of contact]. Any use that does not comply with this Policy or that does not have written authorization from us is not authorized.