On Tue, 2003-01-07 at 06:09, Jeff Morton wrote: > Which brings me to a question... what exactly did they purchase? If > they purchased Deersoft, does that give them the right to enforce the > trademark and prevent the open source Unix style SpamAssassin product > from using that name? Do they hold patents that could shut down the > open source SA project? Having seen Network Associates at work, it > wouldn't surprise me to see them enforce their patents and trademark as > soon as they have a vaguely marketable product under their own power. > Note from the http://www.spamassassin.org/ homepage, 'SpamAssassin' is > a trademark of Deersoft, Inc. > > I'm wondering if anyone can shed some light on the legal implications to > the open source SA project. And please, assume a doomsday scenario, > since this is Network Associates we're talking about.
I have emails from Craig Hughes talking about the possibility of a company buying out Deersoft and trying to be more restrictive on the use of the SpamAssassin trademark. He assured me that they were somehow protecting the name legally to ensure this can't happen, and gave me his word that if they got bought out then part of the deal would be protection of the use of the trademark by the open source project. Of course the downside is we probably lose two good developers, as the FAQ states that Justin and Craig will spend their time working on the proprietary side of things. Does that mean the NAI version is a fork of the open source version? Probably. Does that mean my working on SpamAssassin is a conflict of interest (NAI is a competitor of ours)? Probably. I'll have to talk to my boss about that. Matt. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.NET email is sponsored by: SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See! http://www.vasoftware.com _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
