The need for some sort of a general trademark/logo license

As usual I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

The problem of software licenses is fairly well understood and there are many established alternatives to choose from based on your needs. This is not the case for licenses governing assets such as images and logos and especially trademarks. Many organisations, such as Gnome and the Linux Foundation have their own trademark policy pages, but they seem to be tailored to those specific organizations. There does not seem to be a kind of a "General project trademark and logo license", for lack of a better term, that people could apply to their projects.

An example case: Meson's logo

The Meson build system's name is a registered trademark. In addition it has a logo which is not. The things we would want to do with it include:

• Allow people to use to logo when referring to the project in an editorial fashion (this may already be a legal right regardless, in some jurisdictions at least, but IANAL and all that)
• Allow people to use the logo in other applications that integrate with Meson, in particular IDEs should be able to use it in their GUIs
• People should be allowed to change the image format to suit their needs, logos are typically provided as SVGs, but for icon use one might want to use PNG instead
• People should not be allowed to use the logos and trademarks in a way that would imply they are endorsing any particular product or service
• People should not be allowed to create and sell third party merchandising (shirts etc) using the logo
• Achieve all this while maintaining compliance with DFSG, various corporate legal requirements, established best practices for trademark protection and all that.

Getting all of these at the same time is really hard. As an example the Creative Commons licenses can be split in two based on whether they permit commercial use. All those that do permit it fail because they (seem to) permit the creation and sales of third party merchandise. Those that prohibit commercial are problematic because they prevent companies from shipping a commercial IDE product that uses the logo to identify Meson integration (which is something we do want to support, that is what a logo is for after all). This could also be seen as discriminating against certain fields of endeavour, which is contrary to things like the GPL's freedom zero and DFSG guideline #6.

Due to this the current approach we have is that logo usage requires individual permission from me personally. This is an awful solution, but since I am just a random dude on the Internet with a lawyer budget of exactly zero, it's about the only thing I can do. What would be great is if the entities who do have the necessary resources and expertise would create such a license and would then publish it freely so FOSS projects could just use it just as easily as picking a license for their code.