On 01/09/19 at 03:16pm, William Gathoye wrote:

Hello everyone,

First of all, following a discussion on Twitter, I wanted to know whether this company is authorized to sell goodies (hoodies) with the Arch Linux trademark on it? I know it is being listed on the archlinux.org frontpage, but I wonder what's percentage is given to the project as compensation [1].

As written on the website: "From your purchase we support free software, usually $3-5 from each product sold".

With FOSDEM behind the corner, there have been quite a few discussions on social media and IRC recently regarding stands/community involvement etc. A few questions have been raised wrt. trademark/acting on behalf of the project, etc. and I wasn't able to find an answer on the Wiki. Who can speak on behalf of the community, etc? Even if Arch Linux is a meritocratic organization, do we have such a person inside our community? Maybe it's the right time to fill the gap in the wiki?

I think anyone can speak for the community, being a member of the community. There is however a clear disctinction between being a team member and being a community member. One adds more weight then the other.

To understand better the situation, let's imagine a few use cases.

1. Someone who wants to craft Arch Linux merchandising for him/herself and others given free of charge.

    e.g. I attend FOSDEM and I want to show others I'm an Arch Linux user. If another Arch Linux user passes by and ask me if I have goodies, give them free of charge.

I believe this falls under "Advocacy" of the Trademark policy.

2. Someone wants to craft Arch Linux merchandising for others. No gain other than the one to cover the fees of the company we are ordering from e.g. Zazzle.

    e.g. An Arch Linux stand is organized at FOSDEM and I want to organize it.

I believe this is ok, not 100% sure.

3. A magazine is asking the stand organizer to make an interview on behalf of the community with a question like why do you have dropped i686 compatibility? What is the project direction for the next few years, etc.

Anyone can be interviewed, but I wouldn't say you can claim to be a representative of the project if you aren't on the team.

4. Someone wants to give money to the project. Can he receive a document for taxing purpose?

See http://www.spi-inc.org/donations/

What is the legal process for these aforementioned use cases? According to the trademark rules, we have to ask the the Arch Linux Project Lead for "merchandising purposes".[2] Does asking money to the end user to cover charge can be considered as a commercial activity even if we are not making profits? Are we allowed to answer questions that could involve the whole community?

When someone is donating money to the project, who is receiving it? How can we have transparency about the IN/OUT of the treasury (server cost? etc.). What is the legal structure behind Arch Linux? Are we a foundation like The Document Foundation?

See, what Morten said. Basically all your donations pay for server hosting and SPI costs :-)

When a stand is organized for a particular event, does the Arch Linux organization participate in the funding? I haven't been able to find such an information on the Wiki.

Anyone can organize a stand and promote Arch. Don't know if we ever paid for one.

Because asking for the end user to pay for his/her on goodies is not something that can have much success, especially when the Fedora/Mageia/RedHat/Debian community is giving everything for free in such an event.

Not entirely sure about that point.

For the record, even if I have been participating to FOSDEM since 2012 and have adopted Arch Linux as my daily OS since that date, I haven't been able to see an Arch Linux stand yet. The only things I heard of:

* a small lightning talk about pacman and the way packages are being built * some goodies informally given by the ex. Trusted User Andrea Scarpino.

Do we maintain a list of events whose topic was Arch Linux (other than having to dig into the arch-event mailing list)?

Only arch-events as long as I have been around, other then that some meetups over the past years with fellow members from the team.

Wrt. identity, do we have strict guidelines to follow (e.g. distances, fonts to be used along side the logo, etc.) other than the short notice from our Logo Usage Guidelines of our trademark policy page? [3]

I know these questions come as a burst, but I thank you already for the answers you could give to me.

[1] https://www.hellotux.com/arch

[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DeveloperWiki:TrademarkPolicy#Restricte...

[3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DeveloperWiki:TrademarkPolicy#Logo_Usag...

-- William Gathoye

-- Jelle van der Waa