Some existing policies

• https://www.debian.org/trademark
• https://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/
• https://foundation.rust-lang.org/policies/logo-policy-and-media-guide/
• https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/trademark-usage
• https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/
• https://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines/
• http://modeltrademarkguidelines.org/index.php/Model_Trademark_Guidelines
  • A template for trademark policies

Also, this long article from Google’s open-source book and this FSF-related website (in particular this page) which provide some broader information.

A few things to take into account in the policy:

• How permissive do we want to be wrt the general usage of the name (are 3d-party open-source projects allowed to use the name Nix(OS)? Are proprietary projects allowed? What about company/non-profit names?)
  • Debian for instance is very protective here (“You cannot use Debian trademarks in a company or organization name or as the name of a product or service.”) while python (and a few others like Rust who took inspiration on the python policy) are much more permissive.
• How permissive do we want to be on modified versions of the logo/brand name?
  • Python has a large section describing what is (or not) allowed wrt the logo. Likewise, the OSI has a whole page dedicated to this. On the other hand, the Rust policy is pretty much “do whatever you want as long as you’re not harming the brand or looking like you’re an official Rust project”.
  • The OSI trademark policy has a fairly detailed section as to how to use the trademark. Likewise for the Linux Foundation. Others just don’t.
• How precise do we want the policy to be?
  • The Model Trademark Guidelines template is very long and tries to detail every possible use of the mark. Others like python only try to explicitly cover the most common and unambiguous permitted and forbidden cases, with an “ask us for everything else” clause.

Besides that, it’d probably be good to start from an existing policy to avoid us a lot of painful work. The Python one is a fairly widely copied one and could be a good start. Or the Rust one which seems to be for the most part a trimmed down version of the Python one (and might be what we want depending on how permissive we choose to be)