Re: opie trademark

On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 05:28:04AM +1000, Lorn Potter wrote:
> On Thursday 31 May 2007 04:41, Erik Hovland wrote:
> > On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 04:01:03AM +1000, Lorn Potter wrote:
> > > On Thursday 31 May 2007 02:40, Benjamin Long wrote:
> > > > This infighting and bickering is pointless.
> > > > Right now, the Opie project seems just about dead. If it's not dead
> > > > already this disunity with surely kill it.
> > > > If something can be done to revive the project by bringing it up to
> > > > date, hence not letting all the development time that went into Opie go
> > > > to waste, I say it's worth it.
> > >
> > > Updating Opie to use Qtopia core 4 would take about 10,000 man hours. I
> > > personally saw the process that Troltlech took to do it. It was not
> > > pretty. You basically have to rewrite everything, including starting the
> > > designer .ui files sfrom scratch.
> > >
> > > The Opie developers decided this was futile and pointless, and why not
> > > use the code that Trolltech generates for the next Opie. That saves opie
> > > developers from a fairly futile and frustrating effort.
> >
> > Sure, this makes technical sense. It does not mean that you have the
> > permission of the Opie community that you can re-use the name. And if
> > you are starting from scratch that you even should re-use the name. It
> > just plain isn't your name. I don't say it is mine. But I don't see you
> > owning it.
> 
> 1. I asked Opie devs

Who? When? How did you even decide who you should ask? Who even gave you
permission?

> 2. the person that started the project and whom most likely actually owns the 
> name "opie" doesn't care.

Which basically means that they are giving up any ownership they may
have a right to. It is the unfortunate truth of US patent law.

> 3. I could have started it at handhelds.org - thus moving the current head to 
> another tree, and commiting the new code.
> 4. I asked for access to a new project at handhelds.org and never got an 
> answer, thus obliterating the current opie tree through cvs was the only 
> option to me, which for obvious reasons, I did not want to do.

I once again agree. You had real concerns for not hosting at hh.org.
This fact has never been disputed.

> 5. I could have started it at sf.net. I didnt. I choose linuxtogo because it 
> was new, young, and the admins were open and responsive to requests and 
> needs.

You also knew at the time that there are people w/in linuxtogo who are
openly hostile to hh.org and George France. Which is why you might have
gone to any of the established communities out there. But you chose
linuxtogo anyhow. Which is why I am concerned. And why I think you
shouldn't get to use the name Opie w/out permission.

> > > > As for why this work wasn't done on the hh.org
> > > > servers, I have no idea, and I really don't care.
> > >
> > > Many reasons. For one, that my email to admins of handhelds.org
> > > requesting to start a new cvs tree went unanswered. For another, over the
> > > years, it has been a PINA to get new developers setup for write access to
> > > the cvs, and often taking weeks to do so and depended on the grace of
> > > handhelds.org admins being available and responsive.
> >
> > I can appreciated this issue. The problem is not that you choose to have
> > your new project hosted elsewhere. The problem is that you want to
> > re-use names w/out the permission of the community. 
> 
> G.F is not the community! At least I asked permission and consulted the opie 
> developers/community before I took action, which is more than I can say about 
> GF and handhelds.org. No one really spoke up then, why do it after the fact?
> *cough*

Handhelds.org acted very quickly to try to protect what they consider to
be their property because they consider Opie to be part of their
community. It could have been done better. It wasn't. If I had been
asked by handhelds.org if I thought they should apply for ownership of
trademark of Opie I would have agreed to it.

E

-- 
Erik Hovland
mail: [email protected]
web: http://hovland.org/
PGP/GPG public key available on request

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