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

Tim Stebbing tjstebbing at gmail.com
Thu May 29 20:25:19 EDT 2008


why?

I mean, if you trademark 'Twisted' and developer X goes and calls his
bit of code 'twisted foo' are you going to pursue him in court? To
what end?

If you make it clear you're against people using 'twisted' for twisted
derived products then 99% of the people who are writing twisted
related things will respect your wish, because heck, you're a person
deserving of respect in our community.

The 1% of people who will say stfu, well, who will care about their
project anyway. It just seems like a waste of your time.

Another thought, Twisted is a collective noun for everything that
twisted is, the reactor, deferreds, protocols etc. If someone was to
fork twisted, or implement it in a new language, I don't see how you
could stop them referring to it as 'Twisted Blah', what else are they
going to call it?

How do they refer to the thing that is Twisted without using the word
to describe it> I know people are going to get shirty about the idea
of forking/rewriting anyway, and why would we worry about assisting
people pursuing that use case, but thats why you picked the license
right? to give people those liberties?

trademarking just seems to rub the wrong way, makes people suspicious,
goes against the ethos man ;)

my 2c

tjs

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 9:15 AM,  <glyph at divmod.com> wrote:
> 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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-- 
Timothy J Stebbing




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