OSI Logo - Terms of Use

[Donovan Hawkins]

On Sat, 16 Feb 2008, David Woolley wrote:

> Given what I understand to be the reasons for the requirement, could I 
> propose that one solution might be for OSI to permit people to application 
> level proxy the http request for the image, so that there is no permanent 
> storage of the image on the subject's site, but no information about the 
> cient, except the time at which the image was fetched and the IP address of 
> the proxying organisation, is passed to OSI.

That assumes that the privacy-concerned people trust the Boost site. It 
seemed like this was more of a general "offline documents shouldn't 
contact the Internet" principle, not specific people who don't trust the 
OSI.

Personally, I think anyone that concerned with privacy should take their 
own steps to ensure the document they read isn't initiating Internet 
connections or their privacy is an illusion. However, it would be good if 
the OSI clarified whether they are asking for linking to the OSI *whenever 
feasable* or whether they insist on it always. Being able to include the 
logo in static documentation seems reasonable.

Perhaps there is some bit of legal disclaimer like "Trademark status 
subject to change, please see www.opensource.org/trademark.html" that 
could be included with such images. Alternatively or in combination, 
people who want to use the image statically could give the OSI a contact 
email so they can be contacted when the status changes and make the 
appropriate updates.

I would be inclined to avoid images that require linking on my own site 
just to avoid an additional point of failure (I detest sites with banner 
ads that take forever to load because the banner server is down). It would 
be nice if one of the above solutions would also allow you to use a local 
copy of the image on your website.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Donovan Hawkins, PhD                 "The study of physics will always be
Software Engineer                     safer than biology, for while the
hawkins at cephira.com                   hazards of physics drop off as 1/r^2,
http://www.cephira.com                biological ones grow exponentially."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------