Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on May 26, 2007 01:44 PM
the bottom line is GPE is their project to do with as they please.
No, that's not the bottom line. The bottom line is that it's a community project, the community has split, and both parties have a legitimate claim to the name; Nils for being the founder and Hh.org for being the community that developed it. In a legal sense there is no question that Hh.org was first to use GPE(tm) in trade, thus the trademark registrations are legitimate and necessary to protect against the fork of GPE which totally denies any legitimacy to Hh.org's claim. In terms of Open Source norms, the founder has pretty strong claims to the direction of a project unless someone else has developed stronger claims. Nils has a legitimate claim to control the project.
My view of the matter is that the name is less important than the code. Since Hh.org has expressed a strong desire to keep the name, the simplest solution is for GPE to rename (nominally fork) and write better code than Hh.org.
Learn about Linux
Download Linux
Get Linux help
Re:Stupid kingdom building!
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on May 26, 2007 01:44 PMNo, that's not the bottom line. The bottom line is that it's a community project, the community has split, and both parties have a legitimate claim to the name; Nils for being the founder and Hh.org for being the community that developed it. In a legal sense there is no question that Hh.org was first to use GPE(tm) in trade, thus the trademark registrations are legitimate and necessary to protect against the fork of GPE which totally denies any legitimacy to Hh.org's claim. In terms of Open Source norms, the founder has pretty strong claims to the direction of a project unless someone else has developed stronger claims. Nils has a legitimate claim to control the project.
My view of the matter is that the name is less important than the code. Since Hh.org has expressed a strong desire to keep the name, the simplest solution is for GPE to rename (nominally fork) and write better code than Hh.org.
#