Re: opie trademark

On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 04:00:34AM +1000, Lorn Potter wrote:
> On Thursday 31 May 2007 03:40, Erik Hovland wrote:
> > On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 12:40:25PM -0400, Benjamin Long wrote:
> >
> > Well, I personally don't mind what people do with Qtopia 4. And I can
> > see the technical reasons why Lorn would want to use another community
> > resource then handhelds.org to scratch his itch on Qtopia 4. But it is
> > obvious that people running linuxtogo and people running handhelds.org
> > don't get along. So taking something that has largely been part of the
> > handhelds.org community and reusing it at linuxtogo is not something I
> > want to see happen. All it can do is lead to confusion. And it could
> > potentially worsen the relationship between said people.
>
> OpieII is not in the same situation as GPE.

No one says it is. It would be nice if it didn't turn into that
situation. Because that one is very bad.

> What George and handhelds.org are saying is that essentially, they own the
> names to the projects they only hosted on their web site.

I disagree. What handhelds.org is saying is that if you choose to
be part of the handhelds.org community, handhelds.org will attempt to
help you keep your trademarks from being misused.

> A big slap in the face, especially after 5 years of being with this
> project and _then_ being told that the hosting web site is trying to
> trademark you own work.

I can see how it is hard to accept that something you worked on for
several years is not yours to do with as you please. But you are not the
only author nor the only "current" developer.

I hope you can understand that I would like to establish some boundaries
and guidelines on how things get used because I would like to see Opie
and what you have called OpieII to prosper. One of those boundaries is
that linuxtogo and handhelds.org are separate and that Opie on
handhelds.org is continuing. I am not the one pushing the trademark
enforcement, but I do see something called "OpieII" on linuxtogo to be a
problem considering the hostile relationship between people who run
linuxtogo and people who run handhelds.org.

> > > Start building it on Qtopia-Core. Expand. Otherwise, all this is doing is
> > > holding active developers back.
> > > When the day is done, the code speaks for itself. It doesn't matter what
> > > it's called.
> >
> > Absolutely. The code speaks for itself. Lorn et al are welcome to make
> > their augmentation of Qtopia 4 be the best of class for palmtop
> > environments. But since I intend to work on the original code base at
> > handhelds.org, I would appreciate it if Lorn called his work something
> > else.
>
> You might be forgetting that many parts of Opie are my work as well, and as
> far as I know, still have write access to my copyrighted materials and I
> consider myself still a part of Opie developers, even though I have less and
> less time to write code.

I am not forgetting. In fact I thank you explicitly. I should note that
you have brought up a significant gray area. You do have write access.
So do many people who have not actively contributed to Opie in quite a
few years. Does that make you a current Opie developer? This is
something I would love to clarify. Because it is not clear to me who is
part of the Opie community and who should have a say in this. It is
pretty clear to me who is part of the handhelds.org community, should
they decide? Maybe they should since Opie does not have a clear course.
I don't know if I can answer these questions without some discussion and
getting an audit of who has write access and authorship w/in Opie.

If I may, I know you have write access to CVS and one of the issues with
the GPE situation is that the write access to CVS was abused. That has
not yet happened w/ Opie. Since I am currently working on Opie, I ask
anyone w/ write access to that CVS repository to act with good
judgement. It would be awful if the situation escalated before we
finished this discussion.

> > It would really help in differentiating the original Opie from
> > what he is doing if he complied.
>
> Hence the new name... opieII

If you think this is different enough... I don't think so. If you want
to go through the work of getting the Opie development community
together and arranging getting permission to use the Opie trademark, I
consider that a reasonable step forward in using it.

I consider it most unfortunate that Opie is starting to get dragged into
the problems between other communities. I would like to work toward a
solution. Can we do that?

E

-- 
Erik Hovland
mail: erik_at_hovland.org
web: http://hovland.org/
PGP/GPG public key available on request