TechCrunch has a post up about how the Data Portability group is using Fedora’s logo. TechCrunch agrees with Marc Canter who says, “Do NOT spend 0.001% of your mindshare - time - or energy - worrying about a LOGO! Get a different logo.”

To me, that sounds quite childish. I’ve been an avid supporter of the Fedora Project since I started using Fedora Core 3 ever so long ago. The current fedora logo at the right has been in use since (if I recall correctly,) fedora 6 or 7. That was a very long time ago, and it took the Fedora project a very long time to come to the current logo. Now this good-intentioned portability group comes along and tells Fedora that they need a new logo because its stupid to fight over it.

Last I checked, things don’t work that way. Its called Copyright, and the Fedora project owns it over the logo. If Fedora has any hope at all to be popular, then they need to fight to keep their current logo. Before the artwork team devised this great and meaningful logo, it seemed like Fedora had a new design every release. An incredible amount of effort went into creating this logo that embodies everything the Fedora project stands for (see the notes here).

TechCrunch closes by saying “The ideas are what’s important - the logo is irrelevant. RedHat should have just let it go, but you guys can’t waste mindshare on this. Have a contest and let fans create a new logo for you.”

If they ideas are important, why does it make the Fedora logo any less important? You can’t just “have a contest” to create a new logo, when the current one means so much and has had so much thought put into it.