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Check out http://www.cmg.de/aktuelles/aktuell .htm#TopOfPage This is german, fish it if needed. There seems to be no legal trouble, just renaming won't hurt. No evil Krautz eating your pants. :)

The CMG has made a press release. You can read it at http://www.cmg.de/aktuelles/aktuell. htm#P7_138.

I don't make a translating here, but the main points are:

• The didn't sue everyone, but only one company
• They invested lots of money over many years in their software called SAMBA
• They only want to prevent confiusion between their SAMBA and the SMB Samba.
• They don't want to battle with the open source community, contrary they welcome this kind of development.
• They stop suing the german company, who is only providing service for Samba, and trying to find a compromise solution with the international Samba team.

I think, their action was a little bit hasty and big companies tend to have a different view than the open source community, but they seem to be on the right way now. :-)

cu
Waldmeister

• the name is protected since 1994
• it was only one company they wrote to, and they already stopped the action against them
• they never intended to hurt the OSS, only wanted to protect their investment
• they now contacted the australien company owning the name of the SAMBA-OSS to resolve the problem

• the name is protected since 1994
• it was only one company they wrote to, and they already stopped the action against them
• they never intended to hurt the OSS, only wanted to protect their investment
• they now contacted the australien company owning the name of the SAMBA-OSS to resolve the problem

And this is the link to the homepage about it. Note the e-mail address. Please all do as I did. Go to the heise article, and forward it to FINANCE.Stuttgart@cmg.de with some comments to make them clear that they'd better back off.

Btw as an ex-CMG (holland) employee and shareholder I am very dissapointed about this. The dutch CMG branch always tries to play nice with UNIX/Linux enthousiasts, to get a good image for recruitment.

If they had even the faintest bit of common sense, they'd asked the sambahq.de webmaster to put a line on the welcome page like if you're lookin' for the banking stuff, go there . Well, another missed opportunity to demonstrate their friendliness.

PS: good luck to www.samba.de

If you are a german maybe you want to tell your bank what you think about this and why you think about moving your account somewhere else, (most of them are banks) if they appear on this list.

In this case i'm less concerned about a business trying to defend their name than about the way they do it, namely using 'Abmahnung' demands where unsuspecting businesses get a letter demanding money from them just because they used the wrong wording in their advertising (see this comment for a pretty good explanation).

As a matter of fact Heise misquoted the product name - it should read Standard Anwendung Meldewesen Banken (cv. CMG), which more or less translates to Standard Application for Reporting between banks. It really looks like it is something german and proprietary.

Okay, here's the deal:

In Germany, a firm called CMG seems to have registered a trademark for the word 'Samba'. That trademark refers to banking software, which seems to handle all kinds of banking transactions, using forms, etc. If you feel like wading through a longish list of features in German, see their product site.

CMG, makers of that software, have sent out snail mails to all people subscribed on a German Samba mailing list (i.e. the UNIX SMB software), and have demanded that all users immediately stop using, distributing, or advertising said software. Yeah, that's right: if you're using it, you have to stop doing so right now.

CMG is doing a so-called 'Abmahnung', i.e. a non-judicial process in which a private business/person can demand money from someone disrespecting their trademarks/trade laws. The total value of this process - CMG wouldn't say how many people are affected - is said to be about 100 000 German marks (DM), which is about $60,000. Their lawyers are also demanding 1900 DM from each of the parties involved. That's right - you were using Samba, you got the letter, you have to pay their lawyers about $1200 - until August 8. They'll probably sue the involved parties for that sum of money afterwards.

The c't article adds that Volker Lendecke, one of the German Samba developers - in order to avoid such trademark issues - had already registered a Samba pictorial logo trademark in Germany last year.

Such 'Abmahnung' demands are pretty common in Germany, lawyer firms routinely search advertising directories, etc. for anything that may be considered ambiguous in any way, or infringing on anyone's trademarks, and send out ludicruous demands out, often to people who have no way of acting against them. Whilst it's easy to claim that Germans are idiots and no such thing would ever happen in the US (free speech, etc), please remember that frivolous suits are pretty uncommon in Germany: people claiming money for eating peanuts and suing because they were allergic to nuts and there was no 'WARNING: May contain nuts' label on the box, or people suing because they spilled hot McDonalds coffee on themselves, would be laughed out of court in Germany. This is a fairly normal thing - the same would happen in the US if, say, I created a mySQL spin-off and called my new database 'Oracle' or 'Interbase', I'd be in a lot of trouble for trademark infringement. *shrug* It's that simple. Firms have to defend their trademarks, or they lose them if they become diluted.

Alex T-B
St Andrews