[Twisted-Python] suggestions for naming to help us preserve a Twisted trademark

glyph at divmod.com glyph at divmod.com
Thu May 29 19:15:15 EDT 2008


Hello, Twisted community:

I'd really like "twisted" (and our various "dot product" subprojects) to 
be a trademark that the software freedom conservancy can protect and 
defend.  For similar reasons, I'd like to have an unambiguous naming 
convention for projects which are *part* of Twisted versus those which 
are built on it or are compatible with it.

There are a few projects out there that just call themselves "py- 
whatever" but use Twisted (for some reason, none come to mind at the 
moment); that's fine, of course.  The jabber transports which use 
Twisted are pyMSNt, pyICQt; I'm not sure if the "t" stands for 
"transport" or "twisted" :).  There are also a few projects out there 
called "Twisted Whatever" which aren't part of Twisted; I can only hope 
that more projects will want to advertise their association with Twisted 
in this way.

I'd like to suggest, however, that new projects use the word "Twisty" in 
this context rather than the hopefully trademarked "Twisted".  i.e. if 
you are making an implementation of the protocol Bloobloo and want to 
give it a name associated with Twisted, please describe it as "Twisty 
Bloobloo: an implementation of bloobloo for Twisted", and name your 
packages similarly (twistybloobloo.stuff).  Sun has a great webpage 
about how to use their trademarks in this capacity: 
http://www.sun.com/policies/trademarks/.

I'm aware of 3 projects which are currently called "Twisted X" but are 
not actually a part of Twisted.  The first is Twisted Goodies, which was 
named with our explicit permission.  I appreciate that Ed asked first, 
and so he is welcome to continue using that name.  (I'd still prefer 
that it be changed to "Twisty Goodies" just to help establish the 
convention and reduce potential user confusion, but realistically there 
has not been any actual user confusion about that package, and packages 
with our explicit permission I don't believe weaken our copyright 
claim.)

Two other things that I'm aware of using names like this, however, do 
not have our permission, and if those authors are listening here (or if 
someone who knows the authors here could get in touch with them) I'd 
really like their names to be changed: Twisted SNMP and Twisted Storage.

Most of all though I hope that all 1000-odd subscribers to this list 
have their own soon-to-be-released project which can make use of this 
new convention ;).

Also, if a graphic designer out there could help with a modified version 
of the logo that could be used in the way that the Debian "open use" 
images, that would be helpful: http://www.debian.org/logos/#open-use




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