[Fwd: Re: [Foundations] RubyForge strategies for abandoned projects]

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

[resending to get it onto legal-list]

Hi,

Here's an interesting mail from Josh Berkus of postgres on trademark
protection.

Luis, as far as you're concerned, are the die cast for our trademark
applications, or are we making false assumptions about the value of a
registered mark?

(not offering an opinion, just asking the question)

Cheers,
Dave.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Foundations] RubyForge strategies for abandoned projects
Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2007 10:10:24 -0800
From: Josh Berkus <josh agliodbs com>
Organisation: PostgreSQL @ Sun
To: Ron usmedrec com
CC: foundations lists freedesktop org
References:
<!&!AAAAAAAAAAAYAAAAAAAAALn4DBa9j89Bkul53Jf1ky/CgAAAEAAAAKZHKzQfrYRIrVi7mvAu33wBAAAAAA== USMedRec com>

Ron,

> I wonder if your concerns couldn't be addressed by leaving the
> document optional and not requiring it at all for new projects.  The
> document is really only important for projects that enjoy some amount
> of success and use, so maybe it should only be suggested after some
> boundary is reached.

Well, it's more that I wanted to get across that there are two roads an
OSS organization can go down, the "paperwork" road and the "no
paperwork" road. Both involve tradeoffs of time & resources and
strategic goals, and neither is self-evidently better than the other.

Because, I think, they get advice from corporate lawyers frequently,
there's a tendency from the incorporated OSS organizations with
signficant assets to think like lawyers and not question whether there
are points of view which are being simply assumed as true without
examination.

As an example, I've seen a fair amount of ink, and heard more talk,
about protecting your project trademark. All of those articles and
sessions simply assumed, a priori, that a trademark was valuable to an
OSS project and needed to be defended; there was no arguments of why,
just how. Yet when it came to a decision about whether the PostgreSQL
project would spend time and money to defend the PostgreSQL trademark,
nobody on this list was able to come up with a compelling reason to do
so -- certainly not one that balanced out $25,000 in lawyer fees.

I'm not saying that the "paperwork road" is inferior or a bad idea.
What I'm saying is bad is choosing the paperwork because you haven't
made a conscious decision and are just going along with what some
attorneys tell you.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco
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-- 
Dave Neary
dneary free fr