Topic: Mirror and branding

[qvindesland]

Hello all
 
Apologies I know that this is most probably the wrong place but I just want to say that my smeserver.norhex.com mirror will be down from the 21'st until the 23 this mirror will be down due to an upgrade, I will start synchronizing as soon as possible.

One little more thing, I see that there is a Swedish website www.smeserver.se that calls smeserver their main product and uses the same logo, they have put a link to smeserver.org and contribs.org and they do not charge anything for smeserver only their consulting services, but I do find it a bit odd also that they use the same logo as smeserver, I am just wondering if there is any agreement between smeserver.org and this swedish site, I have sadly seen previously companies that do both charge for gnu licensed solutions and also call it their own something that I really hate.

Regards
Per

[jumba]

Hi Per!

I can answer your question above about smeserver.se, since I own and run that site.

Firstly: We DO NOT use the same logo as SME Server, - all we do is displaying the SME Server logo beside the name SME Server just the same way as we display the Ubuntu logo beside the name Ubuntu (something we work a lot with as well) or the ASUS logo beside the name Asus.

Our own company logo is displayed on the upper left corner on all our web pages.

Secondly: We DO NOT ANYWHERE pretend to say that SME Server would be "OUR PRODUCT" in any way! We try to be very clear about this, SME Server is of course a community driven open source product and nothing else.

What we actually do for business is promoting the usage of open source products such as SME Server and Ubuntu here in Sweden/Scandinavia. For our smaller business customers, we try very hard to promote the usage of the product SME Server as a very reliable and secure server solution. We offer 24/7 subscription services for all customer systems, and this is actually the very first time someone has even suggested that our business approach might be "suspicious" in any way.

No, we don't have any "formal written agreement" with contribs.org, but we have certainly discussed our business approach with leading people in the organisation behind contribs.org.

If anyone in the community has any problem with us displaying the SME Server logo together with the product name we will certainly remove it immediately!

Please forgive me if I might sound a little bit upset here, but I feel very warmly for FLOSS products in general and SME Server in particular and would never dream about mis-using them or breaking any written or unwritten rules.

Any further questions regarding my private company would better be directed to our mail info_AT_smeserver_DOT_se

Thank you.

Best Regards:

Lasse Johansson AKA Jumba

Update: Just in case someone still feels uncomfortable with our company site, there is now a written statement on every web page footer clarifying things a bit more...