trademarked logos and GPL

[Bart Decrem]

Hi everyone,

I have a feeling that the question I'm about to ask has been asked & answered a few
times already, so I do apologize for that.

We at Eazel are trying to figure out what we need to do so we can distribute our
corporate logo along with our Nautilus software, which is GPL'd, without losing our
ability to control the use of our trademark.

It looks like Red Hat distributes their logo in a separate RPM, which is released under
very restrictive licensing terms, and that there are a few GPL'd applications (most
prominently Red Hat Update Agent) that have a dependency on that.

So we're thinking of doing exactly the same thing.  We use the Eazel logo as a
'throbber' (think: the throbbing N in your Netscape browser).  The installer for our
Nautilus software would always install that logo.  But if someone objects to the
licensing terms of the logo, they could uninstall our logo RPM, in which case they
would see a generic throbber.  The CVS version of our source code would only include
the generic throbber.

Is this the best way to proceed?

Bart