MDK

So there is a set of conversations happening in the community at the moment whether it is on respectable blogs such as Philip Smith’s discussion on Perl Typefaces, the discussion on the EPO marketing list regarding logos or London Perl Mongers call to bring more (cuddly/stuffed) camels to their next social meeting(!). These discussions all regard the look of Perl, in regard to quality and consistency and I thought I would tackle the issue of the logo.

There are two logos that people identify with Perl. The first is the Camel used by O’Reilly on some of their Perl books and adopted by the community (and London.pm with Amelia and Shadowcat Systems/Enlightened Perl Organisation with Niles) as a fun logo to use.

Niles (on the left) and Amelia (on the right) meet in Lisbon

The second is the Onion which I believe was created as a logo to represent Perl (it is an onion it has many layers, they could have chosen a tiramisu :) ). The Onion is owned by The Perl Foundation.

If you wish to use either of these logos you must first (and quite rightly) contact either of the two bodies who own the copyright/trademark for these logos, and who will usually grant you permission as long as the involvement is with Perl and not derivative (or -too- derivative if we count Matt S. Trout in an Onion t-shirt).

So there is an issue as the logos in question are owned by a corporate body and an organisation and therefore have restrictions in how they can be used/displayed and cannot be freely used by anyone wishing to do so. One must seek permission and even if this passes smoothly through the inevitable red-tape you must still be careful not only to make sure you do not deride the logo and to ensure content in location doesn’t breach any conditions that the company may set. To take a random for instance, O’Reilly could rightly restrict me using the Camel on a page that advertises the Apress/Packt Catalyst books and so could TPF as it shows favouritism to a company/companies/competitor. I am not saying they will do, but we have no control over them doing so, and it may be within their best interest to do so.

What is the answer?

It is quite simple to me, in order for us to have a logo that can be picked up and used by anyone in the community and used in any manner to promote Perl or their Perl-related project we must have a logo that is associated with Perl that is under Creative Commons licence. The more we use such a logo to promote every site/article/work/whatever in our language the faster it will grow in perception as being the recognised, adopted standard.

To do this we must either persuade O’Reilly or TPF to release the image under a CC licence or we must come up with a new logo for Perl and release it under the CC licence. The author of such work can still claim Artistic Copyright but it must be allowed to be used by everyone however they wish.

There is an issue of releasing it as CC and then someone producing derivative forms of the logo for their own purposes, but to my mind this isn’t much of a problem. Let us examine this, if we have a hundred sites that use the logo in a good faith manner to promote Perl and a random punk decides to mock us with an obscene version of the logo how much damage would that actually do? The answer is very little if any at all. To the people outside the bubbles (either in Perl or in the punk’s kingdom) their would be the perception of a recognised logo showing consistency and brand recognition and a random site created by someone with too much time on their hands.

There could be an issue of someone using the logo for their own product as it carries a CC licence, but if the logo is actually called The Perl Logo, then that is also part of the Licence, so let them. It would be kinda funky to have a logo called The Perl Logo on the side of a -come up with your own obscene, techy, smart or satirical item here-.

For me, I would like to see The Perl Foundation release the Onion as the logo for Perl under the CC and to let us use it as we see fit. They could even take a specific version of it and make it their copyright image and leave us the outline vector art for us to fill, merge, warp, cut and manipulate as we see fit for our sites and modules. As long as we have some recognisable element that makes people in the community see it as Perl and that we can present as part of our branding and display as Perl then it is forward from where we stand now.

If that isn’t possible, then I may be willing to put money, and to grab other people into putting money, into having a logo either designed for us, or as a prize in a competition.

Let me know what you all think…the debate is on.