Nuxified GNU/Linux Help Forums - Freedomware Logo - Comments

Yes, I agree fully.

libervisco — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:22:27 +0100

Yes, I agree fully.

The primary challenge we face...

land0 — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:06:29 +0100

..is the fact that Freedomware has yet to be accepted as a broad term for marketing FOSS. We have found that getting artists to contribute their time and skill to any FOSS project is directly related to the popularity of projects. Once marketing Freedomware becomes popular and exciting I can see us receiving a positive response to an artwork request/contest enough to consider it a good cross section. This is where incremental development of the logo is key IMO. It is very true that we have plenty of time to get the perfect metaphor.

I would say that the blog post at this point should be about seeking the perfect metaphor whether in a text description or rough artwork submissions. That is my opinion anyway.

Talk soon

nice one indeed, I like the

Hassan Ibraheem — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:31:03 +0100

nice one indeed,
I like the second one more too

The drop metaphor is quite

libervisco — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 12:20:18 +0100

The drop metaphor is quite a nice shot I'd say. With a bit more polish perhaps it could work.

But since I believe there's no big hurry yet, there's still space and time for new ideas until we have some sort of a "critical mass" (not really mass, but a good number of ideas) to choose from and consolidate.

I agree with at some point, perhaps soon, opening the doors to more publicity so that other people can contribute to this initiative. I would be willing to write an article/blog and submit it to news sites calling people to give this a shot.

As said previously, I do think before we choose the final winner here it we should go through various ideas and iterations and also give it a good publicity test too.

But there's really no hurry. The whole Freedomware Marketing campaign is, the way I see it, just getting started. There's a meeting tonight which will further the thoughts and plans and solidify some things.. Well you'll all hear of the results in due time. It will ultimately be an open process. This first meeting is sort of "closed" because it has a very specific purpose and allows us to talk without cacophony. Eventually we will probably have open meetings and discussions.

Cheers

>> ...with artwork contests

Jose — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:54:14 +0100

>> ...with artwork contests that they are very time consuming and take a lot of work and total commitment. It takes an enormous amount of work to keep them on track. That being said if you are willing to head up such an adventure

I wasn't thinking of anything too complex. I suppose work put in would be proportional to work put out. If so, I might be willing to give it a try (ie, if getting some small number of entries, judges, and voters if any would be acceptable). Like I said elsewhere on thetuxproject, I am willing to take some chances and do some testing this year on a small scale with no real goals except to go through some of the mechanics and help break the ice (for myself and for others).

Well, you certainly made me cautious.

>> Once we have accomplished that I would have no issue taking it to a larger body of artists like deviant art. However I do think that the logo and metaphor that we develop here should be the initial logo that we use to represent Freedomware. Any "improved version" could be easily added later.

After making the suggestion I realized that it might be something that might be done since it might not be too controversial (but you never know). If it is just having a larger audience provide input, that should not be too big of a deal. If it is having a larger audience submit candidate entries, we'd want to defend against them coming up with a trademark on the item by asking that we would need to be given all rights.. But this would not stop someone from copying something else (general copyright violation).

>> As for your footnote I respectfully disagree. I will post my reasons behind why in the appropriate thread at a later time.

I am glad I asked then because I do want to get as much input as possible. I think the link I provided might be a proper forum. And I do think some FOSS definitely helps (eg, OO and most likely also FF and some others).

I can tell you from a lot of experience...

land0 — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:52:25 +0100

...with artwork contests that they are very time consuming and take a lot of work and total commitment. It takes an enormous amount of work to keep them on track. That being said if you are willing to head up such an adventure then I would be willing to give some pointers. Unfortunately I am not currently able to allocate enough time to such an event.

That being said. This thread is a first swipe so to speak at creating a logo that would correctly visually communicate the ideals behind freedomware. So the first order of business is create the correct metaphor and graphic that we are all in agreement on. Once we have accomplished that I would have no issue taking it to a larger body of artists like deviant art. However I do think that the logo and metaphor that we develop here should be the initial logo that we use to represent Freedomware. Any "improved version" could be easily added later.

As for your footnote I respectfully disagree. I will post my reasons behind why in the appropriate thread at a later time.

I don't know where this

Jose — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 14:19:49 +0100

I don't know where this thread is headed, but keep working on it.

Lots of free(dom) art by FOSS groups will help grow FOSS awareness. Logo or no logo.

Yes, I like the clear drop too.

Better than the clear drop and the rest of the artwork (and I know I am going off topic here) is to encourage tons and tons of people to create free(dom) artwork. They already have open artwork sites though.

..say, have you people considered posting some of the better options online somewhere and getting others to make suggestions and contributions? Make sure to let them know about the licensing (bringing up the licensing issue carefully may be a good idea). Let them know that they can use whatever however they want (well, within the constraints of the particular license).

Although I know that it would be a personal decision, providing the recipes to how the art was made adds value to whatever we present or ask for (and our message).

Hey, imagine if we hold a contest where we have people submit entries (pics?) along with recipes that are kept under lock and key throughout the contest. Everyone else has to try and reverse engineer the images/entries and submit their guess. At the end, we unmask the solutions and those that survived the guessing get something. Yes, people can put trash that is difficult to reverse engineer so we would need to carefully think about the rules of the game.

Another idea is to periodically give out clues to how to build a large project. We can have weekly sessions where a lesson is taught. Over all the lessons, we would have built the large art project that was showed at the beginning.

We can start small with these contests with whatever volunteers we get and then try to accumulate more people with more and more talent to participate.

One rule should be that all software used to create the art should be FOSS since that is the only way to guarantee that virtually anyone can use it regardless of their financial status or what platform they run on their computers. [see footnote]

If we build sufficient volume with the contests/publicity, it will attract (at least some new) good artists to look into FOSS tools. It may also get those great artists that are working quietly within the community to come out and help showcase what FOSS tools can do.

Remember that artists aren't just artists. They are computer users. They are hobbyiest. They are people with businesses. They are people that may like the spirit of FOSS and what it can do for themselves and those around them. They also bring valuable skills to the table.

Also: I am getting acquainted with youtube slowly. I think we could all help each other by hooking up on youtube (eg, channels or groups ?). It would make it easier for multimedia gimmicks we come up with (yes, I am guilty of crazy ideas) to get a running start.

[footnote: I would like to discourage almost any typical FOSS dev from porting their apps over to Windows specifically as it helps sustain that closed monopoly unlevel playing field; however, FOSS means it can be ported (and in some cases Microsoft might pay money for that benefit) which is the main point of FOSS. Windows/Vista is a special case where I think ports hurt the greater FOSS movement. .. just trying to clarify the comment above about FOSS being cross-platform in a way that is consistent with views expressed at http://www.nuxified.org/topic/gnu_linux_help_forums .]

I think I may be onto to something.

land0 — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:40:05 +0100

In Rolling with the water metaphor *no pun intended* theobroma and I have created a couple of very viable candidates for the logo. I like both of them. But I really dig the simple one as it is very clean and almost refreshing. It also translates nicely to gray scale. I think this logo visually communicates many of the concepts behind Freedomware. Including individualism, being a part of a larger body along with the powerful metaphors that are provided by the properties of water.

The colors you used in...

land0 — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 06:53:27 +0100

...your sketch reminded me of a gradient based color pallet that theobroma created a while back. It is beautiful and cheerful. Even the brown looks sexy.

I also attached the .svg. If it can be, it is liscensed under the GPL v3.

I really think this is the color pallet we should use.
1. It is complete
2. It is beautiful
3. It has bright joyful colors like you mentioned earlier

Here are a couple of examples using the rough ideas to show a contrast.

Freedomware logo

land0 — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 06:40:45 +0100

There was a discussion started on a recent blog post by libervisco about a logo to represent freedomware. I thought we could continue the discussion here.

Here is the logo.

I will add any changed versions here that we come up with.

**It was mentioned that the it looked like a person was trapped inside a barrel. It was also mentioned that by rotating the person 180 degrees it would symbolize the copyleft symbol.**

Like this

Yep I can confirm what

libervisco — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:43:48 +0100

Yep I can confirm what Land0 said. I was talking via email with RMS about it and he checked with his lawyer, so yeah as Landy said, there is a trademark, but it is in a field sufficiently different from software not to be a problem.

Btw, I like the leaf metaphor and leaf as a logo element as well. I would say though some differentiation would be needed because nowadays I can imagine a lot of firms and initiatives could have a leaf integrated into their logos.

Adding a computer in a drop is one nice touch as a way to do that. We could still experiment with it further.

One thing that comes to mind is like what you can see in RedHat's "Choice" video which features a leaf that is in one moment displayed as a sum of networked objects.. In fact the whole metaphor in the movie revolves around things getting interconnected to form a whole. As the video says, "It's not the cells, it's the system". It basically says that in Freedomware (in a video named "Open Source") individuals are all part of something much bigger, just like in nature. Just like atoms form moleculs which form materials which form objects which form complex engines so do individuals working on one particular piece of creation in a community end up creating this whole culture. In a Freedomware world this culture is actually software..

Anyway, the idea is to perhaps add some sort of a representation of this "network" to the leaf, making it appear as if it is consisted of some natural network components... perhaps little computers on all peaks of the leaf interconnected with some lines..

Or it could be presented as one leaf in a branch. That one is focused, but the background shows that this one leaf comes from a family of leafs which form a branch... and everyone knows branches are part of a tree...

Just some rough ideas.. might not work too well, but in any case I think whatever we come up with it may be a good idea to keep this "everything is a network" metaphor in mind (regardless if it is network of cells, network of people or network of computers). It is really the network which allowed the kind of cooperation that is happening in Freedomware and it is a network which allowed it to become so revolutionary. That network is network of networks, AKA internet.

Trademarks

land0 — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 20:50:00 +0100

Someone brought this up before we really started pushing the Freedomware-Gamefest 2007. In the end one of the attorney's from the FSF was asked to spend some time looking into possible gotchas with the existing active trademark. The attorney found that it was not an issue. There is more to the story. But I was not the person in direct contact with the individual that brought it up. I was just CCed into the conversation as a courtesy.

In short it is not currently trademarked by any entity that would be in conflict with what we are doing. Trade marks are allowed to overlap given that they are not being used in similar/same markets.

There has been some discussion about acquiring the trademark in the US. But there are a few things that need to happen before we can pursue that.

Like a logo...

are trademarks relevant in

Hassan Ibraheem — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 23:12:47 +0100

are trademarks relevant in this discussion ??
IANAL , but freedomware is an active trademark in the US.

would that be a problem?

I think robbery is just a

Hassan Ibraheem — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 22:45:15 +0100

I think robbery is just a connection in my mind where the man figure looks like running away from something...

IMO, I see the juggler is a good logo because of two things...
firstly it solved the "top-view" issue with previous logo.. so it made it more clear

secondly the balls that fills the circle makes the logo feels complete as one whole element

Here is a...

land0 — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 22:24:31 +0100

...rough real world example.

Freedomware Logo

land0 — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:26:53 +0100

Freedomware is a term that is being used to communicate and market Free and Open Source Software to people new to the ideas and realities behind it.