Re: Our official home page and logo for the Git project

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 11, 2014, 19:25 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqr453sm76.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20140411114017.GC28858@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> The git-scm.com page is mostly targeted at end users: what is it, how do
> I get it, where is the documentation. Things like a logo repository, or
> developer information is spread across various wikis and other sites.
> If there's interest, we can make "dev.git-scm.com" for such things, or
> host repositories under http://github.com/git. But we would first need
> content to put there, and somebody would need to step forward to
> organize and maintain that content.

The mention of "dev.git-scm.com" gives me a mixed feeling. The chasm between the developer community and casual end-users who know about Git primarily via their perusal of git-scm.com is one of the root causes of this confusion.

The pages at https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page are done primarily by developers, and between the two logos on that page, the one that appears inside the page under "Main Page" header has long been the logo that Git people immediately recognised as the Git logo. That logo originally appeared on gitweb, I think, and is in my tree (on the other hand, the logo in question on the motion does even appear anywhere in my tree). We didn't feel a need to declare it was the official logo. That was from back when Git community did not have strong needs for "branding".

The one on the left-top corner was one of the alternatives that received favorable reactions from multiple people (I am not sure if there was a clear "majority" though) submitted when we briefly had a poll to come up with an updated logo.

https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitRelatedLogos has many other "Git related" logos, many of which I do not even recognise and are nowhere near "official".

In any case, this motion is not about "let's declare the logo we see on git-scm.com today as _the_ official one". It is not about "that logo on git-scm.com sucks; let's come up with a better one". People are welcome to do that discussion elsewhere, and I do not mind a repository of contestants created somewhere, but personally I think the project is too mature for that and it is too late, even though the "bleeding-red fork" logo may not be my favorite.

The motion is about this:

    Outside people, like the party who approached us about putting
    our logo on their trinket, seem to associate that logo we see on
    git-scm.com today with our project, but we never officially said
    it was our logo (we did not endorse that git-scm.com is our
    official home page, either, for that matter).

    It is silly for us to have to say "Ehh, that is a logo that was
    randomly done and slapped on git-scm.com which is not even our
    official home page, and the logo is licensed CC-BY by somebody
    else.  Go talk to them.", every time such a request comes.

    Please help us by letting us answer "Yup, that is a logo (among
    others) that represents our project, and we are OK with you
    using it to help promote our project" instead.

That is what I meant by "our official logo" in the first message.

So,... seconds?