41–45 of 45 posts
We had an open source business without having CLAs in place and it took several months to get everyone who contributed (around 200 people) when we sold our company.
CLA Assistant easily plugs into any Github repository to make this painless.
I think its important to understand what you are also getting into with a trademark. They mention: actively asserted and defended in order to have legal meaning. This is a critical piece of owning a trademark. It must be defended which means that you have to issue cease and desist letters, normally engaging an attorney to do so, or else you risk losing your trademark altogether or it becoming genericized, i.e. 'Kleen…
This is often repeated, but misguided: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not... Genericides do occur, but they are rather exceptional, and you generally can't do much about it (imagine the public starting to talk of dashboards as grafanas). Cease-and-desists should probably be reserbed for severe missuse, such as a competitor selling their product as yours, etc.
I suppose that might open the door to the party making wider use of the trademarked term though.
I think its important to understand what you are also getting into with a trademark. They mention: actively asserted and defended in order to have legal meaning. This is a critical piece of owning a trademark. It must be defended which means that you have to issue cease and desist letters, normally engaging an attorney to do so, or else you risk losing your trademark altogether or it becoming genericized, i.e. 'Kleen…
This is often repeated, but misguided: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not... Genericides do occur, but they are rather exceptional, and you generally can't do much about it (imagine the public starting to talk of dashboards as grafanas). Cease-and-desists should probably be reserbed for severe missuse, such as a competitor selling their product as yours, etc.
Fully agree. Some distros are packaging my software with bad patches constantly and then ignore requests to rename the package to make it clear that it's a fork. Unfortunately for small projects registering a trademark is just not feasible. I have considered going from actual open source to source available though.
This is (part of) why I use the zlib license.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is often repeated, but misguided: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not... Genericides do occur, but they are rather exceptional, and you generally can't do much about it (imagine the public starting to talk of dashboards as grafanas). Cease-and-desists should probably be reserbed for severe missuse, such as a competitor selling their product as yours, etc.
On this topic, can someone explain how Elasticsearch got f*cked by AWS which is using their name for their competing hosted ES service?
You can sell a Honda with after market parts and still say its a Honda. You just can't sell a Kia and call it a Porsche trying to trick people.