One of the functions that the GNOME Foundation provides is to act as the legal owner for such GNOME project assets as the GNOME name and the GNOME foot. We must protect these trademarks in order to keep them. Therefore, we have some guidelines for their use and a standard agreement for user groups. These cover many common situations; if you need permission to use the GNOME trademarks in other ways or have other questions, please contact licensing@gnome.org.
The GNOME trademarks are:
Under the law, “fair use” of trademarks is allowed (for example, trademarks typically may be used without permission in magazine and book reviews). The GNOME Foundation trademark usage guidelines for third parties describe what is appropriate fair use of the GNOME trademarks.
User groups are a very important part of the GNOME community. User groups have a need to make use of the GNOME trademarks in such ways as creating and distributing marketing materials or creating web sites. (The usage of the term user group here is broad: the canonical example would be a group of people using and promoting GNOME in a specific locality, but it could also be a group of developers working on an open source GNOME application or many similar non-commerical uses.)
By agreeing to the GNOME user group license agreement a user group obtains permission to use the GNOME trademarks under certain conditions.