Hi, As you may or may not know, we have been working on a new GNOME application, Boxes[1] that (among other things) enables users to easily manage virtuat-machines. This also includes ability to detect operating-systems given an installation media and presenting an intuitive and impressive UI to user to easily install different operating systems with minimum or no interaction. Boxes makes use of a new library, libosinfo[2] that provides information about operating systems (which it internally keeps in an XML database).
The reason I'm writing to you is that we really want (more like need) to show logos of different operating systems to the user[3]. In attempt to avoid violating possible trademark issues, here is the approach I took in my (currently unaccepted) patches:
1. libosinfo only provides (HTTP) URLs to logos of particular OS/product but not the logo itself in any form.
2. Boxes downloads the logo at runtime when needed (when user inserts installation media of the OS in question or has installer ISO image in her/his home directory), caches it on disk and presents it to the user as shown in the screenshot[3].
So I would very much appreciate it if you can provide answers to the following questions:
1. Is Boxes (or libosinfo) in this case is violating any trademarks already (assuming only the logos shown in the screenshot)?
2. If the answer to the question#1 is 'no', is there a good chance we violate trademarks of OS products in future? If so, is that avoidable?
3. If the answer to the question#1 is 'yes', could you please advice us how to implement this essential feature without violating any trademarks?
-- Regards,
Zeeshan Ali
[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Gnome3.4 [2] https://fedorahosted.org/libosinfo/ [3] http://static.fi/~zeenix/tmp/boxes+win-fedora-ubuntu-iso-logos.png