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FOSS Community Criticizes SFLC over SFC Trademark War (lunduke.com)
Earlier this month Bruce Perens notified us that "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." Now Slashdot reader curcuru -- director of the Apache Software Foundation -- writes:
No matter how you look at it, this kind of lawsuit is a loss for software freedom and open source in general, since this kind of USPTO trademark petition (like a lawsuit) will tie up both organizations, leaving less time and funds to help FOSS projects. There's clearly more to the issue than the trademark issue; the many community members' blog posts make that clear.
GNOME executive director Neil McGovern
Apache Software Foundation director Shane Curcuru
Google security developer Matthew Garrett
Linux industry journalist Bryan Lunduke
The key point in this USPTO lawsuit is that the legal aspects aren't actually important. What's most important is the community reaction: since SFLC and Conservancy are both non-profits who help serve free software communities, it's the community perception of what organizations to look to for help that matters. SFLC's attempt to take away the Conservancy's very name doesn't look good for them.
Bryan Lunduke's video covers the whole case, including his investigation into the two organizations and their funding.
GNOME executive director Neil McGovern
Apache Software Foundation director Shane Curcuru
Google security developer Matthew Garrett
Linux industry journalist Bryan Lunduke
The key point in this USPTO lawsuit is that the legal aspects aren't actually important. What's most important is the community reaction: since SFLC and Conservancy are both non-profits who help serve free software communities, it's the community perception of what organizations to look to for help that matters. SFLC's attempt to take away the Conservancy's very name doesn't look good for them.
Bryan Lunduke's video covers the whole case, including his investigation into the two organizations and their funding.
Actually, the appeals court in Oracle v. Google ruled that APIs could be copyrighted. We were previously interpreting based mainly by the finding in CAI v. Altai. As a result of the new finding, I do not believe that dynamic linking works as an insulator between GPL and proprietary software. There will be more litigation and maybe this new ruling will be overturned, or maybe not. I always felt that dynamic linking of proprietary and GPL was risky and never advised my customers and their attorneys to do it.
The point about having a build environment is that the AGPL3, which you use, is a sharing license, and if you only share unbuildable software that is in general an attempt to avoid what the license requires. There is not any rule saying you have to provide a Windows build environment, but you are supposed to provide all of the Makefiles, etc., and whatever internal tools you built that are necessary for compiling and installing the software. These are generally things that make a manufacturer-specific installable BLOB file.
Nobody is compelled to use GPL code. If sharing and license compliance is going to be a problem for your business, you are not part of the target user community of the developers, and please don't build it into your proprietary product.
People who have problems understanding this stuff are welcome to contact me privately at bruce at perens dot com. I don't charge and sometimes there is complexity and implication that I can clear up for you.
Bruce Perens.
Please read this:
http://www.rants.org/2017/11/c...
for a possible answer to your question. I'm surprised this isn't linked to from the main article.
Full disclosure, I'm on the Board of Directors of SFC.
A few words went missing in my post. That should say:
"As I originally stated, with laches you lose the right to enforce to the degree that you failed to police it."
For example, if a university allows local businesses to print and sell T-shirts using the university logo, and doesn't take any action to stop them over a number of years, they'd lose the right to enforce it on T-shirts printed by the local businesses. They wouldn't lose all trademark rights.
Here SFLC not only ALLOWED the SFC to use the name, officers of SFLC helped *choose* the name for SFC to use and did the trademark registration. This is like if you helped write the Debian Social Contract, borrowing wording from the Open Source Definition, then you turned around and sued Debian for copyright infringement on the Definition - suing them for doing something you helped them do.