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.

Comments

Names

[Anonymous Coward]

'Judean People's Front'. We're the People's Front of Judea!

Re:Names

[mykepredko]

Splitters!

Re:Always happens

[arth1]

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.

These are the projects SFC represents

[Bruce Perens]

These are the member projects of SFC. An attack on SFC is an attack on these members as well. This is a catalog of 46 of the most respectable Free Software / Open Source projects. In contrast, I hear that SFLC represents one project.

ArgoUML

ArgoUML is the leading open source UML modeling tool and includes support for all standard UML 1.4 diagrams. It runs on any Java platform and is available in ten languages. See the feature list for more details.

Bongo

The Bongo Project is creating fun and simple mail, calendaring and contacts software: on top of a standards-based server stack; we're innovating fresh and interesting web user interfaces for managing personal communications. Bongo is providing an entirely free software solution which is less concerned with the corporate mail scenario and much more focused on how people want to organize their lives.

Boost

Boost provides free peer-reviewed portable C++ source libraries.

Boost emphasizes libraries that work well with the C++ Standard Library. Boost libraries are intended to be widely useful, and usable across a broad spectrum of applications. The Boost license encourages both commercial and non-commercial use.

Boost aims to establish “existing practice” and provide reference implementations so that Boost libraries are suitable for eventual standardization. Ten Boost libraries are already included in the C++ Standards Committee's Library Technical Report (TR1) as a step toward becoming part of a future C++ Standard. More Boost libraries are proposed for the upcoming TR2.

Bro Network Security Monitor

Bro provides a comprehensive platform for network traffic analysis, with a particular focus on semantic security monitoring at scale. While often compared to classic intrusion detection/prevention systems, Bro takes a quite different approach by providing users with a flexible framework that facilitates customized, in-depth monitoring far beyond the capabilities of traditional systems. With initial versions in operational deployment during the mid '90s already, Bro finds itself grounded in more than 20 years of research.

Buildbot

Buildbot is a freely-licensed framework which enables software developers to automate software build, test, and release processes for their software projects. First released in 2003, Buildbot is used by leading software projects around the world to automate all aspects of their software development cycle.

BusyBox

BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It provides replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in GNU fileutils, shellutils, etc. The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts. BusyBox provides a fairly complete environment for any small or embedded system.

BusyBox has been written with size-optimization and limited resources in mind. It is also extremely modular so you can easily include or exclude commands (or features) at compile time. This makes it easy to customize your embedded systems. To create a working system, just add some device nodes in /dev, a few configuration files in /etc, and a Linux kernel.

Clojars

Clojars is a community-maintained repository for free and open source libraries written in the Clojure programming language. Clojars emphasizes ease of use, publishing library packages that are simple to use with build automation tools.

coreboot

coreboot is an extended firmware platform that delivers light

Re:These are the projects SFC represents

[Bruce Perens]

I think you're not in their target audience. I would in general write in C++ rather than C when I have a reason to not do things in Ruby, simply because C++ offers an upgrade over C structures and their management. I try to stay away from STL templates, and haven't used Boost for similar reasons. But I know that Boost has a lot of use at companies, and on some larger projects in the Open Source world.

Re:These are the projects SFC represents

[Bruce Perens]

I'm still working on a blog post. SFC has never represented me and I've never been a member. I do think they're good guys, though, and the Linux Foundation (which is behind this) has devolved to being like loggers who claim to speak for the trees.

Re:These are the projects SFC represents

[Jeremy Allison - Sam]

Try learning go Bruce (golang.org). It's C done *right*. If I had to write Samba again from scratch, I'd do it in go.

Re:These are the projects SFC represents

[Bruce Perens]

I think you are missing the extent of the relationship between SFC and the Open Source projects. The projects are not simply members of a club. The projects signed over any copyrights that the project owned in their Open Source software and any other assets to SFC to manage as a 501(c)3 for them, and SFC is thus the legal entity for those projects. SFC literally is the project under the law.

Re:These are the projects SFC represents

[UnknownSoldier]

> You clearly don't understand modern c++.

Having worked on a professional C++ compiler you clearly don't understand what I know.

> With that template you get an optimized CRC implementation for a length specified at compile time.

And the _last_ time you had actually had to modify CRC was _when_ exactly? That's right, fucking NEVER.

I would rather take 25 CLEAN lines of code compared to 1,000+ of Crap++. Less LOC code == less bugs.

Not to mention compile times are extremely when you leave out all the Boost shit.

Re:These are the projects SFC represents

[TemporalBeing]

Golang has a lot to learn still. It has some nice things to it; but stability with dependencies you don't control is not one of them. It's a dependency management and stability hell as a result.

So yeah - if you're FB and rolling things out quickly, hourly, etc...then yeah Golang *might* make sense. But if you need any kind of long term stability, multi-language integration, etc- then Golang (and even Rust) is certainly not what you want to be using.

Re:These are the projects SFC represents

[Bruce Perens]

You hold your Open Source work as a personal asset. This is OK for small projects, usually, but has some problems. Your personal liability and the Open Source are mixed up together. You can lose your copyrights to a creditor in a lawsuit that has nothing to do with the Open Source. Said creditor can then bring copyright prosecutions outside of the community standards, and do other things inimical to the Open Source and its users and developers. And you bear some liability for the Open Source, and thus could lose your unrelated assets in a lawsuit about the Open Source, while a corporation could protect you from some of that risk.

SFC's function is a lot more than compliance enforcement. They are, again, the legal entity for their member projects, they are their general counsel, and they provide a 501(c)3 for tax-exempt donations.

I don't see this as any different than an attempt to take the trademarked name of one of the member projects. Or one of their other assets, like a copyright.

Re:These are the projects SFC represents

[curcuru]

Member projects of Conservancy don't have to sign over copyrights or other assets, but are welcome to. Many projects don't assign copyright, and that's fine. But as a 501C3, whatever assets a project does sign over to Conservancy will be managed by Conservancy in line with their charitable mission.

Details of services Conservancy offers to their projects are posted pretty clearly: https://sfconservancy.org/projects/apply/. Project governance and licensing are also mostly project decisions, as long as it's an OSI/FSF approved license.

This trademark cancellation petition does not affect member projects directly - however if (for some strange reason) the registration actually were cancelled, arguably the Conservancy might be forced to change the trademark it uses for itself in the US. Thankfully, Conservancy has a registration in the EU as well.

Re:These are the projects SFC represents

[Jeremy Allison - Sam]

doctorvo wrote:

"The SFC's primary function is GPL compliance enforcement."

That is simply not true (I'm a Conservancy Board member). The *overwhelming* majority of staff time is spent on maintaining projects (doing accountancy, running conferences, handling expense reports and contacting etc.). There is a negligible amount of time spent in enforcement.

Enforcement makes headlines, but isn't a tiny fraction of what Conservancy does.

Re:These are the projects SFC represents

[Jeremy Allison - Sam]

doctorvo wrote:

"Enforcment is the SFC's primary function"

Again, this is simply not true. Samba was one of the initial projects in the Conservancy, and we requested Conservancy have a copyright holding ability as it made it easier for us to accept corporate donations of code. Many corporations do not grant individual developers personal (C), but are fine with a charity holding the (C) on their behalf.

At the time we did not allow corporate ownership of code in Samba, as we didn't want corporations to have the ability to do enforcement actions on their own, without going through what are now called the "Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement" (they weren't written down so concisely back then).

https://sfconservancy.org/copy...

Believe it or not there were occasions when corporations used GPL enforcement to threaten each other over use of Open Source code, and we (Samba) needed to defuse that. I personally know of several examples of this being the case.

Now can, and clearly will, spin Conservancy's actions as being the most negative and devious of activities, but as someone with intimate knowledge of this I feel it necessary to set the record straight for any readers.

Re:Linux is dying due to legal uncertainty

[boudie2]

"Linux is only free if your time has no value"

Kinda like slashdot.

PoC+source/link or STFU.

[Anonymous Coward]

See title.

This story is lacking in particulars or motivation

[pots]

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?

Moglen - Stallman split

[romiz]

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.

Re:Moglen - Stallman split

[Bruce Perens]

I think Eben's fundamental premise is wrong, though. The organizations he cited as rejecting GPL in granting research funding were not doing it because the GPL is scary. They are doing it because they are publicly funded, and the GPL is not necessarily the best license to grant maximal utility in a publicly funded project to all of the people, including the proprietary software manufacturers who presumably pay taxes like everyone else (acknowledging arguments that Microsoft hasn't had any Federal income tax bill in some years). The BSD license was created specifically for that purpose.

Second, why does it worry Eben now that the GPL is scary? Hasn't it been an uphill fight all of the way?

Re:There's only the license and nothing but ;)

[Bruce Perens]

You're right that compliance isn't that big a deal and the only reason GPL violations happen is that companies have a complete failure of due diligence. So, in general I advise that companies get their compliance stuff together, and I give them specific ways to combine proprietary and GPL software that do not violate the GPL.

If you have more questions about how to advise your customers, feel free to ask questions through my email bruce at perens dot com . No charge. If customers attorneys need help with compliance issues, I am happy to talk with them and sometimes work for them. One caveat to that - I only help people comply with the license of the Free Software / Open Source developer. If they want to beat the license and abuse that developer, they need to call someone else. I just do compliance and do not compete with your normal business.

Re:Didn't read

[Bruce Perens]

SFC has been much more active in the community than SFLC. SFLC recently decided that they want to do what SFC does, and the day after they published that decision they filed to challenge the name.