Make terms of logo use explicit (and provide official versions)

[tobyweston]

I would expect the logo to be trademark of EPFL but have found it difficult to confirm or understand if it can be used commercially or otherwise for activities related to Scala training (books, video courses, tutorials etc).

It would be great to add this as a seperate section to the licence page available from the scala-lang.org site (https://www.scala-lang.org/license/) or otherwise add something here.

https://github.com/scala/scala-lang/blob/master/license.md

It might be nice to go one step further and make a png/vector available for reuse (assuming it can be reused!).

I don't actually know the terms of reuse but the closest I found were these:

https://www.scala-lang.org/old/node/2647.html
https://users.scala-lang.org/t/what-are-the-legal-guidelines-for-using-scala-logo/1191

Happy to do a PR if it helps.

[SethTisue]

this is Scala Center territory...

@darjutak is this your department these days?

[sjrd]

That would be for me ;)

Unfortunately it seems nobody really knows, besides the fact that it's copyright EPFL. It was never given an express license by its author. I will put a research on this topic on my todo list.

[tobyweston]

Thanks.

Whilst I’m there, how about the lovely scenery photo from the landing page? Can that be reused in the context of edu?

[martijnhoekstra]

@sjrd for your todo list, apart from the copyright, there is also the trademark, which is a separate concern.

[SethTisue]

most recent verbiage on this I've seen is @sjrd's https://users.scala-lang.org/t/using-scala-logo/6332/3

[SethTisue]

examples from other languages:

• https://www.typescriptlang.org/branding/
• https://foundation.rust-lang.org/policies/logo-policy-and-media-guide/
• https://go.dev/blog/go-brand

[windymelt]

The other day I too ran into a problem regarding logos. I needed a clearly licensed logo to avoid legal liability.

If the logo is distributed as an official asset with a free license, it would help to improve the presence of this language.

[JD557]

Just a reminder (for who might be reading this in the future) that the Rust Foundation proposed some changes regarding trademark usage that were not well received (that blogpost also includes an archive.org link to the old policy).

It might be worth it to keep an eye on how the situation evolves to avoid making the same mistakes.

[newhoa]

It seems Lightbend, Inc. uploaded the logo (here) to Wikimedia under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. I just came across it and this issue while looking for licensing info. Not sure how official that is but it wasn't in the discussion here so thought I'd add it in case it's of any help.

Edit: Sorry, it seems this is incorrect. The logo was uploaded from the Lightbend site and they are noted as "Author", but it seems uploaded by a Wikipedia user. So not official.

The logo above is in two different Lightbend repos (and each repo has a different license): Here in the cloudflow repo which is under the Apache 2.0 license, and here in the antora-ui-lightbend-cloud-theme repo which is under the MPL-2.0 license.

The current scala-lang repo also has a scala spiral logo, and this repo is Apache 2.0. But the license.md also says "Scala includes software with other licenses. See the NOTICE file distributed with this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership." So it is possible it could fall outside of Apache 2.0 but I find no NOTICE file and no alternative license or exception for that file is specified anywhere.

I don't know if these are considered official, but it's the closest I could find.