Hi @anon56695991, thanks for the interesting post. The GNOME Foundation is responsible for registering, defending, etc trademarks around GNOME, Gtk, Flatpak, Flathub, etc as it serves as fiscal sponsors for these projects.
Clarity around acceptable use of these trademarks was part of the reason the board recently turned the release team into a committee of the board - so we could properly delegate the power them to determine what “is” or “isn’t” GNOME - so that if a downstream distributor makes unacceptable changes that impact the user experience, cause confusion or harm our reputation we have a basis from which we can consider / make enforcement actions.
It’s true that as a consequence of emphasising the overall brand of GNOME in the “core” apps, we lose the individual brand identity of those specific applications - and this weakens our ability to use trademark licensing as a way to prescribe the “individual” apps should they be distributed separately from GNOME. The design clarity and experience of a holistic GNOME desktop was considered a higher priority - and it does strengthen the use of the GNOME trademark. ie, the release team could still determine whether something that was a modified Epiphany could still be called GNOME Web or not.
GNOME Circle applications are in a slightly different situation, because a) they are not primarily intended to arrive at the user via an OS distributor as an integrated part of the desktop (ideally more directly from the developer to the user via Flathub or similar) so they very much have their “own” identity distinct from that of GNOME, and b) they aren’t defined by the GNOME project’s design/release/etc teams - they are independently governed by their authors/developers who have the ability to decide what type of trademark policy they might want to implement.
We do have trademarks and legal counsel to support/register/defend/etc marks, so I think it makes sense that we could extend that support to GNOME Circle projects - it makes a lot more sense to me than GNOME Circle not being a complete fiscal sponsorship / support for its member projects and needing to shop around in other places!
So - I like your idea of defining an opt-in trademark policy that Circle projects could choose to apply, but like all things, someone needs to do the work - is this something you’d be interested in helping with at all? Not sure if you’re a current Circle project developer or are considering applying. @allanday @felipeborges are Circle folks and may have more thoughts.