Usage of postmarketOS branding to describe a distro-specific software flavor

One of the things that got brought up on the fediverse (and elsewhere) is the possibility of packaging the Mediaberry platform code as a UI option for postmarketOS.

The main issue with that is distro-specific things getting misinterpreted by the end user as things that are inherent to the platform, when the reference distribution does things differently.

The most obvious solution to that problem is to show the logo of the distro it's running on (e.g. "Mediaberry, postmarketOS flavor"). Debian does this with Kodi, for example:

The problem is: I'm not actually sure if that is acceptable usage of the postmarketOS branding, let alone for any given way of phrasing it.

Is this allowed, or at least not objected to by the postmarketOS team?

changed the description

Thanks for opening this issue. Currently, there's no policy, but looks like this is something that should be tackling. Does the upstream project have some vendoring process? Like KDE or GNOME allowing to change the logo, that we do!

I've queued this to the next team meeting, taking place either at the end of December of beginning of January

Mediaberry doesn't have a branding policy at the moment, but if you want I could easily write one.

The logo itself is just the text "Mediaberry" in the Gidolinya font, which is the same font license as the font used in the postmarketOS logo.

Not sure that would be particularly relevant though. I'm just thinking about putting the postmarketOS logo next to it as a separate image.

I don't think that'd be an issue at all, specially if the branding gets done in pmaports during packaging. We do that branding for many other UIs. Maybe would be different for commercial applications, but that does not seem to be the case

Just made a quick prototype of what I mentioned:

The DOM tree looks like this:

By default it shows no distro branding at all, but I made a JavaScript function that adds a logo image. I made the above screenshot by putting this file in the same directory (temporary hack - there will be a proper platform API for getting a local logo URL later on) and running addDistroBranding("logo_icon_text.svg"); in the JavaScript console.

If that would supported upstream (requiring no patches downstream), that sounds very similar to what other projects do, so would be totally fine usage of the logo

changed the description

we quickly talked about this in the team meeting, and came up with:

• if upstream encourages customizing the UI like that and has a good way to do that (i.e. by shipping a config, without overwriting or patching anything), then let's do it
• otherwise let's not customize it

One thing I would ask: If I add a branding config file in the sysapps repository (which by default would be a stub implementation) that distributions can easily customize (e.g. by just adding a config file and a logo image via the APKBUILD) to set information about it, would that be enough?

Oh, sorry we missed this one! But yes, that fits into what others do, and what we approved. So looks completely sensible Closing for now. Please feel free to re-open if you have more questions

closed