On Jun 5, 2008, at 10:58 AM, Mike Pelletier wrote:
I'm late to the party, but if people are flinging pennies around, here's two of mine.
Instead of lawyering up the Twisted franchise, maybe you could instead use the DivMod brand to bless things that you want to be able to be authoritative about. There's already a sort of informal understanding of territoriality; "This DivMod stuff is ours. You can use it if you recognize that we make a living off this and we'll defend it. This other Twisted stuff is everyone's, and we're just custodians." Bringing the law into our comfortable community w/out taking an arms-length approach (eg, give the trademark to a not-for-profit) is kind of alienating. But maybe I exaggerate.
This is a feeling a few other people have expressed. It's understandable to feel like this is "lawyering up" the community, but it's important to be pragmatic about the environment we're in right now. Free software/open source has made a lot of ground in the last few years, but I think it's fair to say that the GPL/MIT/etc licenses still have yet to be truly tested. For some projects, like, say Firefox, the threat of potential infringers is almost nonexistent, since practically *everyone* knows what firefox is, and that would be a huge community for a potential infringer to piss off. Nonetheless, the Mozilla foundation has several trademark registrations. Also, did you catch the part where this trademark *would* be held by a non-profit? If you check out glyph's first post to this thread, the Twisted trademarks would be formally held by the Software Freedom Conservancy. -phil