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GPE project and Handhelds.org in acrimonious trademark dispute
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CommentsGPE is an open source application environment for handheld devices based on GTK+. The project was hosted at Handhelds.org starting in April 2002, but moved to Linuxtogo.org in October 2006.
Changing hosting sites was viewed as a hostile act by some at handhelds.org when it was first proposed, and controversy ensued once the developers decided to make the move. The GPE developers who proposed the move found their Handhelds.org accounts disabled. Links to the new Web site at gpe.linuxtogo.org were removed from the GPE project page at gpe.handhelds.org, access to the wiki was restricted, email addresses were unsubscribed from the GPE mailing list, and messages removed from the archives.
In time, the battle subsided, and individual contributors resumed work. Mailing list traffic and source code commits at the two sites indicate that a majority of GPE developers joined the effort hosted at linuxtogo.org. A number of other, unrelated projects continued to use the hosting services at Handhelds.org.
IRC dispute
The issue of trademarks came to the forefront last weekend, with both parties wanting control of the #gpe IRC channel at Freenode.net. According to Freenode, the channel had been unregistered but in use for some time. Gpe.linuxtogo.org applied for ownership of the channel in November. On March 28, Handhelds.org applied for a number of changes to its own channels, including a request that #gpe be forwarded to a new channel, #handhelds-gpe.
A Freenode staffer, unaware of gpe.linuxtogo.org's prior request due to a large backlog in the processing queue and believing the change to be a renaming convention, made the changes requested by Handhelds.org on May 18. Upon discovering the error, Freenode notified both parties that there had been a mistake. After consulting channel logs, they determined that gpe.linuxtogo.org had in fact been using #gpe, and approved its ownership request.
Subsequently, Handhelds.org sent a "letter of notice and demand" email to Freenode and CC:ed its own attorney, insisting that Freenode return ownership of #gpe to Handhelds.org. Freenode responded that it had acted in good faith, unaware that there had been any dispute over the channel's ownership, and that in light of the dispute it would hold #gpe in trust until such time as the two parties came to an agreement. The gpe.linuxtogo.org developers then created a new channel, #gpe-project, for their own use.
GPE trademark information
Handhelds.org claims that GPE is a Handhelds.org trade name, and has been since the beginning of the GPE project. The gpe.linuxtogo.org development team asserts that it represents the active project, that the GPE name preceded the project's time at gpe.handhelds.org, that GPE was never owned by Handhelds.org, and that Handhelds.org never acted as anything other than a service hosting provider.
Regarding the GPE trademark, a www.handhelds.org page states: "BootBlaster, BootBlaster3900, bootldr, Familiar, GPE, Handhelds.org, Intimate, ipg, iPKG, ipkgfind, ipkg-utils, MailSentry, and Opie are Trademarks of Handhelds.org, Inc." The site's CVS repository indicates that this sentence was added in the May 15 revision. Prior to that date, the page did not made trademark claims to the listed terms, extending as far back as 2000, according to the archived versions at the Internet Archive.
The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) records trademark filings on Opie, GPE, and iPKG, all under the name of Handhelds.org administrator George France, all filed on March 6, 2007. The other marks listed as belonging to Handhelds.org do not turn up in any filings through the USPTO's trademark applications and registration retrieval server.
The status of all three filings is "newly filed application, not yet assigned to an examining attorney." All three cite dates in the spring of 2002 as the date the mark was first used in commerce.
Although it is difficult to say with certainty when the name originated, GPE is mentioned in a December 2001 message to the handhelds.org iPaq mailing list, written by GPE developer Nils Faerber and pointing to a GPE project page at Faerber's employer, kernelconcepts.de.
Freenode says that it will continue to retain ownership of the #gpe channel -- which currently contains pointers to both #gpe-project and #handhelds-gpe -- until a resolution is reached. It notes that the approval of a trademark in one country does not guarantee ownership of an IRC channel on Freenode, since the network serves an international community. Handhelds.org says it is now looking for a new IRC hosting service.
Comments
on GPE project and Handhelds.org in acrimonious trademark disputeNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
How does this battle over "GPE" and the rest of the dispute help the project?
Asked another way:
What are the expected benefit(s) from winning this fight that out-weigh the created bad will and wasted time, money and energy from this fight?
This is stupid and obviously ego driven by at least one side!
Handhelds.org needs to just let it go since the "GPE" developers have moved on anyway. That would be the easiest and "right" thing to do.
Barring that, the "GPE" developers need to just pick a different name and get on with making the project way better than the "GPE" that remains where ever else. How about GTK+ Mobile Environment or GME?
Get over yourselves and get back to work!
In particular, Florian Boor got his access revoked because he deleted portions of the CVS tree. Misbehavior like that cannot be ignored even if you have a backup. Who needs that kind of crap?
Not to mention the bizarre idea that the same project hosted in the same place must start calling itself a fork? Then again, it's also a bizarre idea that the founder of a project is expected to fork his project. Plenty of bizarreness to go around, and yet the article is completely one-sided in its viewpoint. Not exactly fair.
Perhaps the best solution is for both projects to rename?
> deleted portions of the CVS tree. Misbehavior like
> that cannot be ignored even if you have a backup.
As effectively a provider of hosting you can't simply "punish" someone like that by attempting to take away their project just for being rude and irresponsible. They may not have gone about it in the best way, but the bottom line is GPE is their project to do with as they please.
Is handhelds.org actually going to develop GPE or is this purely a personal dispute? You speak of forking, but if almost all of the developers move away and you still try to keep the project are you not in fact the people making the fork?
Even if you disagree with the ownership issue, you can't disagree with the fact that this is affecting the GPE user community and also any potential GPE users. I mean, if you as a potential user search for GPE and you find two "current" websites, how can you be anything but confused?
Please, step back, look at it from all angles and tell me you are being completely rational, unemotional and reasonable about this. Ask yourself: is this the right thing to do for the software? Is this the right thing to do for the handheld Linux community as a whole?
- A user
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.
That community (the majority of the contributing part of it, at any rate) has arguably moved to linuxtogo. Who from the team of active GPE contributors is left at handhelds.org? In the perfect end-game for handhelds.org, they "get the name back" and then what?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.
It's one thing to say "I disagree with the way this particular project is being developed, so I'm going to fork it so that I can develop it myself", and totally something else to say "the place where we have been hosting our project so far no longer fulfills our needs, so we're going to move our own site". All nastiness and bad behaviour aside, from all information outwardly presented, the latter is what happened.
You stated that Nils is effectively the founder, and has a legitimate claim to control the project - so why can't he do that? Why should he allow someone else to control the name or the project itself? Sending "letters of notice and demand" is hardly within open source norms, either.
Back to the point I was making in the parent post, which is - what is the point? Nobody benefits from what is being attempted here - potential GPE users and contributors will be confused and/or discouraged, valuable development time is being wasted, and the climate of ill feeling is definitely being worsened. Why can't we all just get on with what we are supposed to be doing, which is creating and using free and open source software, instead of playing petty politics?
- A user
I guess the proof is locked down here:
<a href="http://www.handhelds.org/hypermail/cvs-updates-gpe/current/" title="handhelds.org">http://www.handhelds.org/hypermail/cvs-updates-gp<nobr>e<wbr></nobr> /current/</a handhelds.org>
But that whole thing raises another question: Why would someone try to forbid projects to delete their own data?
The CVS tree was *removed* by Florian and restored by france. Of course there is no record since both events happened external to CVS.
It's not entirely clear what the advantage is if the now two projects had different names. But I guess handhelds.org just wants to get a free ride on someone elses work and enjoy the fruits of an open source projects generated following.
If they seriously wanted to have possible forks of their supposed? project renamed, they should have choosen a different license. The GNU GPL doesn't provide that. It's handhelds.org very own pity if they didn't choose e.g., the Artistic license, when they started it (which is the questionable crux of this whole discussion, of course).
There is no such project renaming rule in the GNU GPL, nor for quarreled open source projects in general. And CHISELED-BY TRADEMARK REGISTRATIONS and SCO-like threatening won't provide it either.
Again, if they want to separate themselves, it was still up to handhelds.org to choose a new name. No problem there. It's probably just that HH-Inc isn't really a<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.org ???
This is why Red Hat can require that a repackager like CentOS remove all Red Hat logos and references from the CentOS distribution (CentOS is a recompile of Red Hat, with a few changes and without the expensive support contract that Red Hat requires its users purchase).
It's also why Firefox--which is distributed under both the MPL and the GPL--can require Debian to submit their patches for upstream approval if Debian wants to call the program "Firefox." Debian's policies don't allow for distributing a program with such restrictions. So they simply call it "Iceweasel" and change the logo.
The issue here is not that you can't trademark a program that you've published under the GPL. It's that handhelds.org is not the owner of the project. They have provided web hosting for the project and are now trying to claim that it is their own. Just because you host something on your webserver does not make it yours.
handhelds.org _is_ a hosting service. At least thats what the developers of Opie project think and have thought. We also think it's wrong of you to try and trademark names of projects that you do not own, nor contributed to in anyway, except as host.
Imagine if sourceforge.net were to try to trademark names of projects they host.
We did not give you permission to trademark our project name, please cease and desist. Nor did we put years of work into creating a product for you.
bugger off george!
Company Profile
GPE, inc. was founded in 1977 in Gainesville, Florida by two pioneering geotechnical engineers. Their mission for GPE was to design, manufacture and supply the geotechnical engineering community with testing and inspection equipment, specializing in hard to find items unavailable elsewhere.
GPE project and Handhelds.org in acrimonious trademark dispute
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CVS Logs Says It All
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on May 25, 2007 02:01 AMWho's being "open" in this open source debate, hmmm?
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