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Software Freedom Law Center Launches Trademark War Against Software Freedom Conservancy (sfconservancy.org)
Long-time Slashdot reader Bruce Perens writes: The Software Freedom Law Center, a Linux-Foundation supported organization, has asked USPTO to cancel the trademark of the name of the Software Freedom Conservancy, an organization that assists and represents Free Software / Open Source developers.
What makes this bizzare is that SFLC started SFC, SFLC was SFC's law firm and filed for the very same trademark on their behalf, and both organizations were funded by Linux Foundation at the start.
There are a few other wild things that have happened related to this. Eben Moglen, president of SFLC and for decades the General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation, is no longer associated with FSF. Linux Foundation has on its executive board a company that is being sued in Germany for violating the GPL, with the case presently under appeal, and the lawsuit is funded by SFC. And remember when Linux Foundation removed the community representative from its executive board, when Karen Sandler, executive director of SFC, said she'd run?
If you need a clue, the SFC are the good guys in this. There's a lot to look into.
What makes this bizzare is that SFLC started SFC, SFLC was SFC's law firm and filed for the very same trademark on their behalf, and both organizations were funded by Linux Foundation at the start.
There are a few other wild things that have happened related to this. Eben Moglen, president of SFLC and for decades the General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation, is no longer associated with FSF. Linux Foundation has on its executive board a company that is being sued in Germany for violating the GPL, with the case presently under appeal, and the lawsuit is funded by SFC. And remember when Linux Foundation removed the community representative from its executive board, when Karen Sandler, executive director of SFC, said she'd run?
If you need a clue, the SFC are the good guys in this. There's a lot to look into.
'Judean People's Front'. We're the People's Front of Judea!
> And remember when Linux Foundation removed the community representative from its executive board, when Karen Sandler, executive director of SFC, said she'd run?
LF removed the community chair when it became obvious that ballot-stuffing would cost $99 + overhead per vote, times however many it'd take. Which is a damn sight cheaper than half a megabuck for an Intel/HP/etc. tier membership. It was always exploitable, but that time a campaign to go ahead and exploit it was uncovered -- so it had to go.
Then they can become the Southern Software Poverty Freedom Law Center.
The saying is "Like Saturn, Revolution devours its children".
Another law that's pertinent is that legal pursuits will always cause exactly as much harm as good.
As opposed to illegal pursuits?
... that every organization promoting technology that Karen Sandler becomes involved in happens to spend its money on totally technology-unrelated topics soon thereafter.
If you need a clue, the SFC are the good guys in this. There's a lot to look into.
Yes, I need a clue. Is this about who's got the longest e-penis and deepest e-vagina? Should we look into it? Mommy?
Too many patent trolls and submarine lawsuits that come out of nowhere and hold you hostage
As they always said, Linux is only free if your time has no value
or like sco vs ibm, a lot to ignore.
- then people would not have to read such poor, failed attempts on pro-Microsoft propaganda from anonymous cowards.
should be called the American Freedom Law Center because they dont represent anyone outside USA,
how can they help Belgian developers ? South African ? Australian ?, Gabon ? , China ?, Hong Kong ? Portugal ?
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Bruce Perens.
Not according to the other group.
Just present the facts, people can figure out what's right.
Depends on whether you use it to pay your tuition.
Patches are welcome.
You could always make your own fork, if it proves to be better the market will do what the market does
What if you buy a quantity with your pell grant, sell it fast enough to pay your tuition then live on the profit?
See title.
Just came for the nerd slapfight, leaving disappointed. Might look again in a day or two.
Non-profits sound great till you have lawyers fighting lawyers (and there are always lawyers joining any powerful non-profit). They get comfortable and start creating little fiefdoms of power as no one really owns a non profit (easy pickings for the helpful lawyer who appears to be contributing so much effort pro bono).
The NRA is basically owned by their main lobbyist and his family. They do nothing but come up with new things that they can sell for their own profit to members. They treat the group like their own personal piggy bank and bend over whenever gun control people yell. They are a false opposition that only supports small and safe pro gun laws and in exchange the Democrat party acts like they still matter and are the gun boogieman.
Same shit here - SJW lawyers trying to dictate who can participate in open source projects. If Stalin made a PR, I would scrutinize it hard. However, if it did good things I would take it. Not sure I would thank him or encourage him more, but I am not some sort of moronic hypocrite that knows nothing about the value of code.
When you invite enough lawyers to the party, they will start doing lawyery things.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You speak as if everything else is perfect. At least we have a chance at fixing these issues rather than having to suffer the consequences of Microsoft of the ilk.
The only discussion of this case that I can find is the one on the SFC website, linked in the summary. The petition itself is a bland claim of likelihood of confusion.
By publicly protesting their victimhood the SFC is asking for us to support them, but there just isn't anything to go on here.
Now, they're making the claim that this is completely out of the blue, so maybe that's the point? Is the idea that they don't know anything about this either?
from either side. I mean, this is lawyers versus lawyers, and who would need/pay them if there wasn't some law suit going on?
Moglen, chairman for the SFLC, has resigned as a FSF councel last year. Perens has stated that he was in fact fired over conflict on regarding GPL enforcement. The source of the split seems to be this talk at a Linux Foundation event, where he criticised some of his own former compliance efforts, and aligned on the point of view of many members of the kernel community.
Sorry to break it to you, but while a lot of these were involved in the early days of open source, they just don't matter much anymore.
In this fight between the two groups: 'strict GPL enforcers' versus 'amical towards offenders GPL enforcers'. What is left for us as Linux consultants to advise our customers? To adhere strictly to the GPL to avoid any and all problems. Something I don't really mind. One could argue that this means that the 'strict camp' wins, but in reality it's the GPL which wins. Stating that one should be very kind to offending customers isn't good advise, because proper advise to any customer has to deal with the faint possibility of a 'GPL enforcement troll'. So the proper advise needs to be that GPL isn't freeware, but that the requirements are easy to adhere too, and - for example - that to avoid possible future legal problems (in certain countries) all kernel development should be GPL. Which should not be an issue as all kernel development should not be 'lengthy' nor contain 'policy'. Proprietary code has its place in userspace. Adding the proper license statements and making the distributed GPL code accessible by their end customers isn't that big of a deal - especially if it's unambiguous that this is a requirement.
Actually it's just that the the Linux Foundation that has abandoned the Free/Open Software Community pack to cater to the interests of the Corporate Big Player's club.
Yeah, professionals like Google, Amazon, Ebay, PayPal, Facebook, the world's top 500 supercomputers and so on all running... Uh oh!
> What makes this bizzare is that SFLC started SFC, SFLC was SFC's law firm and filed for the very same trademark on their behalf, and both organizations were funded by Linux Foundation at the start.
This is one of the major reasons given for deregistering the name "Software Freedom Conservancy". Did you even read the petition? SFLC and and Conservancy used to be much more closely tied together, and now they are completely separate. The similarity of the names makes confusion between the two very likely, and this is now of greater importance than it was in the past.
Honestly think about these names for a second:
1. SFLC's domain name is "softwarefreedom.org". The "Software Freedom" portion is the primary aspect of their name.
2. "SFLC" and "SFC" look *very* similar. It would be very easy for someone to misread one as the other, or mishear one as the other.
3. These two organizations used to be closely tied together, but now are completely separate.
I don't want to hurriedly take sides here, so I won't, but this is not as one-sided as you are portraying it as. SFLC is not necessarily a bad actor, and spurious attempts to connect this to other random events are unfounded.
FWIW, I wrote up a somewhat in-depth analysis of this SFLC / Conservancy dispute here: http://www.rants.org/2017/11/c...
TL;DR: Software Freedom Conservancy is behaving appropriately, and SFLC is not.
http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel
says the slave with the gmail account