Thoughts on Loosening Branding Restrictions?

[Basilisk-Dev]

The discussion in this forum topic had me curious as to what other people think about Basilisk's branding restrictions. Are they too restrictive?

To be clear, I have no interest in making the branding freely usable by anyone, I am just considering loosening some of the restrictions.

If I were to loosen the restrictions they would be loosened to be something similar to the Pale Moon Branding Policies. Currently only people who I have explicitly authorized have access to the branding files, and only people who I've given explicit permission to redistribute builds may do so.

I'd probably also implement some sort of guidelines for people who want to package it for their Linux distributions. The guidelines would be a policy outlining what options they can/cannot use in their build configuration and what sort of patches they can/cannot apply during the build process.

What are your thoughts on this?

[Moonchild]

Speaking from experience loosening the restrictions on branding is a tricky thing that requires a lot of thought and very careful and explicit setting of rules and terms. In short: it's a headache. The other side of that coin is pretty much only potential ease of brand building by more rapid adoption in the short term, while giving up considerable control over your brand long-term.

It's a narrow path to walk and my own past experiences have shown me that being more lenient made things a lot harder because people generally don't respect brand ownership and the guarantees implied by it unless strictly enforced. Ultimately it's your choice but I'd likely not go this knife's edge route if I had to do it again.

[moonbat]

Don't do it. People rolling their own builds should be responsible for supporting them, else you'll end up taking unfair blame and unwarranted support requests when there are bugs. Pretty sure if one can take the trouble of building the code, one can also source replacement branding images and think of a different name for their build. We have already seen that problem here with users of roytam's builds showing up when XP support was long ago dropped officially.

[THX-1139]

I will just refer you to an old saying: "Give someone an inch and they'll take a mile "

[Nigaikaze]

Plain and simple: the more you loosen branding restrictions, the more you loose control over your brand. It's up to you, of course, as to exactly how much control you want over that, but the more flexible and available you make the branding, the more likely you will end up in a situation where someone takes undo advantage of that (and thus damages your brand) at some future point.

[wicknix]

I think it comes down to if you are making money (or taking donations) from it or not. If you are, stay strict and protect your brand. If you are more a hobbyist like me doing it for fun, loosen it up. I think the only real issue might come from *nix/bsd users with obscure systems as they generally have build environments set up and like to tinker. The general windows / mac user just wants to click on an installer and go.

As was mentioned, if somebody can't ask first, or spend an hour to crap out a few custom icons and change a few lines of code to replace links and the app name, they don't deserve to distribute using official branding. There is a reason unofficial branding is included.

[Moonchild]

I think the only real issue might come from *nix/bsd users with obscure systems as they generally have build environments set up and like to tinker.

Aside from "it would be nice if it looks the same" I don't think that's even a compelling reason.

if somebody can't ask first, or spend an hour to crap out a few custom icons and change a few lines of code to replace links and the app name, they don't deserve to distribute using official branding.

Quite right!

[Basilisk-Dev]

Thanks to everyone who replied for their input. Sounds like loosening the branding restrictions is not in the best interest of the Basilisk project in the long term. Official branding files will remain in a private repo.

If anyone needs access to the official branding files please contact me via PM.