Disclaimer: I am just a handhelds.org contributor. I have no legal association with Handhelds.org, Inc. This is not an official opinion of Handhelds.org, Inc.

This story isn't really about trademarks -- it's about whether a contributor to a project can fork it without renaming. GPE(tm) is a project of Handhelds.org. It's always been such. Pretty much nobody (except Florian Boor) thinks that. He's trying to position Handhelds.org as some kind of hosting service. Yes, there are separate projects, but that's to split up administrative privileges. That's a good thing, since Florian, when announcing that GPE was "moving", emphasized this point by DELETING THE PARTS OF OUR CVS TREE HE COULD, posting a message to the front handhelds.org page saying "GPE is moving" and vandalizing our wiki to say that GPE had moved elsewhere. Florian is an "energetic" free software contributor, in the same sense that a bomb is energetic.

So how to convince Florian that this is a project fork? It's going to be hard, since he continues to maintain that handhelds.org merely hosted GPE. That's a rewriting of history.

To protect the name "GPE", the Handhelds.org founders have caused Handhelds.org, Inc to register on our behalf the trademark we've always had on GPE. We gained this trademark by being the first to use the name in trade. Florian's recourse is to rename his fork. The Open Source and Free Software community norms require that a fork be renamed. That's all we ever wanted, but at this point he's cost Handhelds.org, Inc. so much time and effort that we may need to seek monetary damages. It's quite possible for him to seek a settlement by renaming his fork of GPE. If he doesn't do this, and if he continues to disparage GPE(tm), he should expect continued threats. Anybody causing trouble should expect trouble in return.

Oh, and in case anybody thinks it's strange to use trademarks to protect Open Source project names, consider that SPI, Inc. holds Debian's trademark and defends it vigorously. The Linux Foundation, Inc. holds Linux's trademark and defends it vigorously. Both of these groups have gone after trademark infringers, just as Handhelds.org, Inc. is going after Florian.