Trademark and Branding

Community
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Hello,

I have few questions in relation to ERPNext Trademark Policy.

Extracts from Logo and Trademark Guidelines:

The brand name ERPNext and the logo are trademarks of Frappe Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

We’d like to make it clear how ERPNext-related businesses and projects can (and cannot) use the ERPNext name and logo.

We’d like to make it hard for anyone to use the ERPNext name and logo to unfairly profit from, trick or confuse people who are looking for official ERPNext resources.

What do we mean by official ERPNext resources? Since it is a community project, anyone can offer services related to ERPNext. Does this imply that only Frappe Technologies is able to offer official ERPNext resources, or on whomever they confer the right to, till they are doing it for free?

Criteria for permission:

Your project is non-commercial in nature.

Is Frappe Technologies itself a not-for-profit organisation?

Your project neither promotes nor is associated with entities that currently fail to comply with the GPL license under which ERPNext is distributed.

Does it cover entities selling proprietary software?

> Use of the ERPNext name and logo is additionally allowed in the following situations:

All other ERPNext-related businesses or projects can use the ERPNext name and logo to refer to and explain their services, but they cannot use them as part of a product, project, service, domain, or company name and they cannot use them in any way that suggests an affiliation with or endorsement by ERPNext or Frappe Technologies or the ERPNext open source project. For example, a consulting company can describe its business as “123 Web Services, offering ERPNext consulting for small businesses,” but cannot call its business “The ERPNext Consulting Company.”

Similarly, it’s OK to use the ERPNext logo as part of a page that describes your products or services, but it is not OK to use it as part of your company or product logo or branding itself. Under no circumstances is it permitted to use ERPNext as part of a top-level domain name.

We do not allow the use of the trademark in advertising, including AdSense/AdWords.

Interestingly, > We encourage ERPNext-based businesses, and we would love to see hundreds of them.

Additionally, > Why you should not rebrand ERPNext | Frappe Blog

Also, > Any legal issues to sell ERPNext as my product?

Now, I want to understand with this stringent trademark policy, how do you see a company build itself as an ERPNext branded company and at the same time, essentially not use the name anywhere in the product, project, service, domain, company name or for advertisement [:confused:], or only to be used in some convoluted form [refer to consulting business example above]. Getting ideas from Schrödinger Cat!

Suggestions please.

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The project is open source, but the brand is registered by Frappe Technologies.

This is the same policy as WordPress. The concern for not allowing companies to register names / domains with ERPNext is that, it may imply official sanction, which is not the case.

For example someone may come up with “ERPNextCloud.com” which might sound official to the outsider, but if its “ENCloud.com” then it is okay, like it is with “Wordpress” and “WPEngine”

Other than that, we are happy to allow liberal use, esp for community initiatives and events.

I think other than using “ERPNext” in the company name and claiming affiliation (without sanction) other things, like describing services, marketing material, etc would be fine.

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Sure, Thank you.