Before discussing each specific item below I'd like to point out a few things. The ASF had through the incubator given us a link to an online service for looking up trademarks. We were told this service should be used to determine if there were any infringements with project names. I personally used the service for two of the names cited in the items below.
We normally start with that and also do a Google search.
According to the ASF the existance of any trademark alone was not an issue. For there to be an infringement the trademark would have to fall within the same field and domain where the names also match exactly. In the case of the Eve Directory Server for example, the presence of a trademark for "Eve Online", an online game would not be an infringement. I understand your concern but this is not the same name. BTW note that "Eve Online" did not exist in 2002 when we first started using the name Eve Directory Server for this project.
Apparently, the same company has a trademark on "EVE" in Europe and they have
already used it to force a hardware company in the UK to rename their product.
Here is their Icelandic registration
http://www.els.stjr.is/focal/webguard.nsf/key2/br103-2001.html
From the language and terms on the incubator site I was completely under the impression that this kind of name use would not present any legal issues.
Goal #1 is "do the right thing". Goal #2 is "protect our assets".
1) Has Matt Walsh approved transfer of the SEDA name? Is that libraryNo there is no relation between our seda package and the SEDA project on Sourceforge. We just named this thing, seda because we had no name for it at the time. SEDA is what it is as far as the architecture used. It's like naming a cat, cat. I think the SEDA project on Sourceforge actually calls the respective code with the same fuction Sandstorm. SEDA is an acronym used for Staged Event Driven Architecture as you probably already know. It was part of Matt Welsh's doctoral thesis and hence the name and the technology is not something that can hold a trademark. At least this is my understanding - perhaps this can be clarified by legal.
a direct descendant of <http://sourceforge.net/projects/seda/>, in
which case the version numbering should be 4.0, or does it merely use
his architecture (in which case it is wrong to use the name)?
Sorry, software products are not named "product" -- they are given names to
distinguish them from other software. We do not use other people's existing
names without their permission because it would confuse everyone, including me.
[We learned that the hard way with httpd, even though we had permission.]
Matt's toolkit may be code-named Sandstorm, but it is distributed as seda on
Sourceforge. You should name it something like "sedakit" (which probably means
something in another language) or "apseda" (which may be Latin, for all I know).
Furthermore the concept of Threads for example was invented by some OS manufacturer but there are threads implementations all over like pthreads. When does it become an infringement? If we call a SEDA implementation seda? See what I mean? Its kind of nebulous here. I'd like some clarification myself. Regardless I'm totally fine with changing the name here.
I doubt that Matt trademarked the name -- we should simply "do the right thing"
and avoid confusion.
2) Eve is a trademark of CCP Ltd. for use in on-line software. We cannot
legally distribute software under that name.
At a closer glance I noticed the trademark is "Eve Online" and not really Eve. "Eve Directory Server" is not the same name and it does not infringe on this trademark. I do understand your concern though but where do we draw the line. Also for the record we had the name Eve before they did. Sounds silly but true. We've been under incubation for a long time now 14 months and when I checked in the begining they where not even on the map.
Not according to their registration in EU -- it is 2001.
4) Snickers is a trademark of MARS, Inc. It is actively defended and
used on-line, and thus unlikely to be usable by the ASF for more than
a few months before they send us a Cease & Desist.
Snickers is an ASN.1 software library which is a Snacc4J replacement. It's obviously not a candy bar. Do they really have the right to enforce a Cease and Desist? This is definately trademarked by MARS as you say no doubt about that. We need to rename this as well but just for clarification how do companies like this get away with it?
They don't need the "right" -- they merely need to avoid a countersuit for
obstruction. Because it is a well-established mark and that mark is used on the
Internet, they can reasonably constrain use of it on websites. Since the
name is being used because the real Snickers is a snack, we are actually using
the trademarked name (not just any name) and we would lose.
In general, a good rule of thumb is to walk gingerly around companies who
employ teams of lawyers for the purpose of protecting their marks. It simply
doesn't matter why we *might* win such a suit, since the suit alone would be
enough to bury our little foundation in debt.
5) Kerberos is a trademark of MIT. We cannot legally distribute software
under that name.
No trademark is registered with Kerberos as far as I can see. Also looks like Enrique performed some similar searches and found:
"The USPTO Trademark Electronic Search System shows efforts by MIT to trademark Kerberos in the early 90's were abandoned. Published articles up until the late 90's may claim a trademark by MIT, but this is not the case. "
Okay, sorry that I didn't see the abandoned bit. Once the STATUS file is updated
(be sure to update the table entries for the IP stuff), I have no objection to
releasing the non-trademarked name products.
Personally, I think it would be better if you simply released a single alpha
product (like ldapd) and used experience from that to improve the individual
libraries, but I assume you have reasons for releasing independent libraries
right now. Just be sure that each released product has three +1s backing it up.
....Roy
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
