maemo trademark policy officially approved

The maemo trademark policy is officially approved. The draft submitted for community review had just some trivial changes and the Usage Guidelines and Logos have been published in the website for a while. The objective of this trademark is to protect the maemo brand from abuse and misleading usage.

In short, the main implications this trademark has for the maemo community are:

• Nokia is the owner of the brand. That was clear already but now the trademark defines what this ownership implies for third parties.
• There is a new logo with a TM symbol, with some variations. The old "maemo.org" logo is deprecated.
• 3rd parties need to request authorization to publish the maemo logo in their works. Misleading usage needs to be avoided i.e. making look a website or documentation as official when it's not.
• Projects or applications can be called maemo something only if they are authorized by the maemo project. In practice this means that only the official projects are going to have such denomination. 3rd party / unofficial projects created with such type of denomination before the publication of this trademark can keep their names, no problem. We are already requesting a change of name to the new "maemo X" projects being submitted in garage.maemo.org.

More details in the FAQ. We are following the usual practices followed by the consolidated open source projects. In fact the maemo trademark is inspired by the Mozilla Foundation Trademark Policy and the GNOME Trademark Licensing.