On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 10:31 AM, Phil Christensen <phil@bubblehouse.org> wrote:
On May 29, 2008, at 7:15 PM, glyph@divmod.com wrote:
I'd really like "twisted" (and our various "dot product" subprojects) to be a trademark that the software freedom conservancy can protect and defend.
On May 29, 2008, at 8:25 PM, Tim Stebbing wrote:
why?
[snip snip]
trademarking just seems to rub the wrong way, makes people suspicious, goes against the ethos man ;)
I have a similar predilection against trademarking, but when I really think about it, I only feel this way because of the actions of those who abuse the intent of trademark law. However, it's clear that legally, if Twisted wants any ability to protect against blatant misuse of the name, this is the only recourse.
I had almost the same experience. When Steve Holden first let me know that this discussion was happening, I was like "ah, shit." But then, when Glyph talked to me about it, he talked me down. As Phil said, this is the only recourse if we want to have the ability to legally protect *our* (the community's) investment in Twisted. The thing is, this thread got derailed early on, and there is another really important point here that Glyph pointed out to me. Trademark issues aside, we want to provide a mechanism (for starters, a naming convention) by which *more* community members can participate without having to under go the arduous (for a beginner) review process, code scrutiny, etc. In the same way that naming a project "pySomething" is not only an indication of its programming language, but (even more?) that it is a resource of the Python community, naming a project <twisted prefix>Something will do the same for coders who are creating Twisted "community resources." d