Relicense Fedora-logos #460
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I sent this to RH trademarks counselors - this is FYI, not sure if council need to approve or not:
As part of transition to SPDX identifiers in Fedora [1] we found that fedora-logos uses proprietary and non-free license [2]. There are several options [3]. And most appealing is to publish a the files under public license. I submitted the pull-request with this change.
As Red Hat is holder of Fedora trademark, I would like to review this please:
https://pagure.io/fedora-logos/pull-request/24
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/SPDX_Licenses_Phase_2
[2] https://pagure.io/fedora-logos/blob/master/f/COPYING
[3] https://gitlab.com/fedora/legal/fedora-license-data/-/issues/218#note_1396400925
I've created a topic on Fedora Discussion for this ticket.
Please keep this ticket focused. Discuss there, and record votes and decisions here. Thanks!
Metadata Update from @jflory7:
@msuchy with a year after passing and the SPDX licence effort in its 4th (and final) phase, I believe I can close out this ticket as it was serving an 'fyi' purpose. Is that ok with you?
Metadata Update from @amoloney:
No, please do not close this. This is still not resolved.
All I need is Fedora Council statement "OK, it is free to relicense to XXX" where XXX is one of the allowed license.
Thanks @msuchy I will add it to todays council meeting agenda to see can we get this one resolved.
Metadata Update from @amoloney:
Metadata Update from @amoloney:
Metadata Update from @dcantrell:
@ref Do you have input on this topic? I think your guidance could help us navigate the most appropriate next steps here.
This ticket is approaching its second anniversary. This does not seem to be blocking any critical work. The issue of trademark use remains a sensitive one and I believe that the time we spend in legal review is not a useful function of the Council for this particular trademark request.
I would defer this topic to a discussion on the fedora-legal mailing list and seek input from our legal experts on what they advise. At present, the Council requires Fedora Legal input and more consensus from the community on which license we should use for a new license.
Without a firm proposal in place or knowing what license that the community feels is most appropriate, there is no action needed on the part of the Fedora Council at this time. If we want to continue this discussion, I propose opening a new ticket with a clear proposal for a specific license we should re-license to.
Metadata Update from @jflory7:
Metadata Update from @jflory7:
The discussion happened at https://gitlab.com/fedora/legal/fedora-license-data/-/issues/218 which is superior to fedora-legal mailing list in this case.
Everyone is deferring the decision to the Red Hat trademark counselor (whom I notified and was ignored). I would prefer if you reopen this issue and with Fedora Council hat on, approach RH trademark counselor and find the solution.
Metadata Update from @jflory7:
Metadata Update from @jflory7:
This was discussed at today's council meeting with the following outcome:
@jasonbrooks will bring this to the attention of someone in RH Legal and will introduce @jspaleta as well to make sure this can be followed up on and a solution reached.
@msuchy does this request still require a statement from the council to the effect of ' it is free to relicense to XXX" where XXX is one of the allowed license.'? If so, this should be what is asked with RH Legal team.
Metadata Update from @amoloney:
Yes.
See recent activity in https://pagure.io/fedora-logos/pull-request/24
Person from Red Hat Legal here. The Fedora logos are of course trademarks of Red Hat and the actual manifestations of those logos are copyrighted by Red Hat. As an initial note, I am not responsible for advising on matters relating to Red Hat trademarks (there is another member of the Red Hat legal team with such responsibility).
There has been some internal discussion of the referenced pull request with our trademark counsel, but I would not say we truly have resolution. The issue is difficult because: (1) it involves two conflicting legal regimes (trademark and copyright), (2) handling of trademarks in FOSS has been non-standardized and more confused compared to copyright, and I wouldn't say there are good existing upstream licensing models to emulate, (3) Fedora has moved towards greater clarity and rationalization in how it treats package licensing issues, (4) historically, I'd say, Red Hat exhibited an unusually pointed interest in Fedora trademarks relative to counterpart trademarks arising out of other projects (by that I mean, doing things like coming up with such an elaborate license as what you see in the fedora-logos package and so forth - this probably has to do mostly with the age of Fedora and the nature of its connection to Red Hat), and (5) probably other reasons.
I think Red Hat's position is that the Fedora Council does not have authority to relicense Fedora logos (without Red Hat's permission), to the extent that's an open question here. There is a Red Hat tradition of actually delegating the details of open source/open-ish content license decisions involving FOSS project assets to the actual maintainers of those projects, but I don't think that's relevant here because the assets in question have not been treated historically as something free/open/open-ish.
I have recommended to Red Hat's trademark counsel against the proposal to replace the fedora-logos license with CC-BY-ND (or maybe more accurately "CC-BY-ND when read in conjunction with the Fedora trademark policy"), despite the fact that I was I think the first person to suggest this as a possible outcome. The reasons:
I am not aware of any precedent where a community FOSS project has used CC-BY-ND as a logo license for the project's trademarks
I don't think Fedora and Red Hat are prepared to publicly justify such a groundbreaking move, which I think would likely be publicly questioned
CC-BY-ND is superficially appealing because of the connection to Creative Commons and especially because CC-BY-ND (in its various versions) is already classified as allowed-content in Fedora, logo files being a form of "content". However, when you think about it further, CC-BY-ND isn't really such an amazing license. We allow it for "content" for pragmatic and historical reasons, not because we think the license somehow represents enlightened policy.
It's not clear that relicensing to CC-BY-ND solves the problem of the license being not-allowed in the Fedora classification scheme, because arguably the real license is CC-BY-ND plus the trademark policy.
Currently, I don't see any way around the fact that fedora-logos is likely to have some sort of restricted use license (whether the current one or a replacement with possible improvements) that just doesn't fit in with the Fedora license classification scheme. We could revise that scheme to add a category for certain acceptable sorts of restricted use logos ("allowed-logos") (not altogether different from how Fedora accepts various highly restrictive licenses in the allowed-firmware category). I'm not sure there are enough such licenses to justify such a category, and I myself feel that we should not have a license policy that gives special privileges to Fedora.
It is worth looking at whether there are upstream approaches that Fedora could emulate. This might at least involve making the fedora-logos license more community-friendly on a stylistic level. Fedora could also look at Debian's approach to logo licensing, which I believe involves having a logotype license and a non-logotype license, with the logotype logo under a custom restricted use license and the non-logotype logo under a libre license, but I'm not sure how beneficial it would be for Fedora to be seen as copying what Debian does.
https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/debian-astro-logo
GPLv3+
https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/linuxlogo
GPLv2+
https://packages.ubuntu.com/kinetic/plymouth-theme-xubuntu-logo
CC-BY-SA-3.0 AND GPLv3+ AND GPLv2+
SUSE https://github.com/openSUSE/artwork/
CC-BY-SA 3.0
(taken from https://gitlab.com/fedora/legal/fedora-license-data/-/issues/218 )
To be clear, the openSUSE artwork repository being CC-BY-SA does not mean that the actual project logo is not restricted.
openSUSE trademarks: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Trademark_guidelines
Triaging this ticket with
?/needs votesince Red Hat Legal provided an official opinion on this issue. The ticket has been pending since July 2023, and there is no reason why we cannot vote on this matter now and seek closure here.I added this to the Needs Meeting Discussion column on the Council Meeting Planner project board.
Update: I've tagged this
needs/voteagain to bring this to a head. This has been open since July 2023, and Red Hat Legal's November 2025 opinion above gives us enough to make a real decision.Legal's opinion is fairly direct. Red Hat's position is that the Council doesn't have unilateral authority to relicense Fedora's trademarks, and none of the alternatives explored, including CC-BY-ND, cleanly solve the underlying tension between trademark and Fedora's license classification scheme.
Here's what I'd like feedback on before we schedule this for a vote:
For context: other Design Team assets under design/assets are already licensed CC-BY-SA-4.0. The trademarked logo mark itself is the outlier that needs this kind of careful, delegated treatment instead of a blanket relicense.
@msuchy, tagging you since this directly responds to your original ask.
CC/FYI @ekidney @madelinepeck @jesschitas @jbley. This concerns the Fedora Design Team, so flagging that this discussion is happening. No action needed on your part right now unless you have immediate questions.
@amoloney, I think this ticket may be closer to resolution than we realize. I'm not calling for a vote here. Adding
needs/voteis just my personal signal that I believe it's ready. I'll leave it to you to decide when and how this gets scheduled for Council discussion, synchronously or asynchronously as a ticket vote, whenever you feel we have quorum and a clear enough proposal.Assisted-by: Claude Sonnet 5 (1M context)
So, as I understood it, the problem we are trying to solve here is whether we can make a claim that entire Fedora content is licensed under free licenses or we should have the exception in mind. So it is more or less a marketing issue.
Technically, we have the ability to handle fedora-logos licenses in the tool, it is already marked as exception anyway.
As we do not have any path forward we agree with the current state, fedora-logos being an exception from SPDX point of view.
It is not nice from the point of view of being able to make public claims, but it reflects the real intent and the real state of the matter where logos are treated in a special way due to trademark restrictions.
As such I think Council does not have any work to do here, and can close the issue.
The other part
looks like a completely different proposal. And I think it requires new and more detailed discussion.
Essentially, Fedora Trademark is the only thing Fedora Council owns, as it is the only thing which defines what Fedora Project actually is and what it is not. A blanket delegation of this topic to the Design team doesn't look right to me.
@bookwar wrote in #460 (comment):
I think that is fair. I guess we need better documentation in the trademark docs on the Council end of things to make this more explicit than implicit. And at some degree, we do rely on the Design Team to identify what is considered brand compliant or not with the Design Team. Sometimes it is obvious, and other times, it isn't. Maybe we could call upon the Design Team for support when it is warranted
Nope. Not entire Fedora content. Only Fedora logos.
@msuchy wrote in #460 (comment):
I think the point is that fedora-logos is an awkward exception to the notion that under Fedora legal policy licenses like CC-BY-ND at worst (i.e. licenses that would be free except that they might prohibit derivative works and not include patent licenses ... offhand I think that's it) are what apply to all 'content'.
Adding this to the council meeting agenda for Wednesday, 29 July 2026. I think I am in agreement with @bookwar that we cannot actually action this ticket, but I think this might benefit from some discussion.
@amoloney wrote in #460 (comment):
The remaining point I would like to discuss is how the logo@fp.o alias fits in versus a Fedora Council ticket, but I also see that this is beyond the actual scope of this ticket. It is confusing though how we have some documentation which tells people to email logo@fp.o (which happened recently) versus opening a Fedora Council trademark approval request ticket.
The decision from Council regarding this ticket reached in yesterdays meeting[1] is that we will defer to the Red Hat legal advice of not being able to relicence fedora-logos at this time. Closing this ticket as 'deferred/wont-fix'.
[1] https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/meeting_matrix_fedoraproject-org/2026-07-29/fedora-council-bi-weekly-meeting.2026-07-29-14.00.html