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

Duncan McGreggor duncan.mcgreggor at gmail.com
Fri May 30 20:09:03 EDT 2008


On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 10:31 AM, Phil Christensen <phil at bubblehouse.org> wrote:
> On May 29, 2008, at 7:15 PM, glyph at divmod.com wrote:
>>
>> I'd really like "twisted" (and our various "dot product" subprojects) to
>> be a trademark that the software freedom conservancy can protect and defend.
>
> On May 29, 2008, at 8:25 PM, Tim Stebbing wrote:
>>
>> why?
>
> [snip snip]
>>
>> trademarking just seems to rub the wrong way, makes people suspicious,
>> goes against the ethos man ;)
>
> I have a similar predilection against trademarking, but when I really think
> about it, I only feel this way because of the actions of those who abuse the
> intent of trademark law. However, it's clear that legally, if Twisted wants
> any ability to protect against blatant misuse of the name, this is the only
> recourse.

I had almost the same experience. When Steve Holden first let me know
that this discussion was happening, I was like "ah, shit." But then,
when Glyph talked to me about it, he talked me down. As Phil said,
this is the only recourse if we want to have the ability to legally
protect *our* (the community's) investment in Twisted.

The thing is, this thread got derailed early on, and there is another
really important point here that Glyph pointed out to me. Trademark
issues aside, we want to provide a mechanism (for starters, a naming
convention) by which *more* community members can participate without
having to under go the arduous (for a beginner) review process, code
scrutiny, etc. In the same way that naming a project "pySomething" is
not only an indication of its programming language, but (even more?)
that it is a resource of the Python community, naming a project
<twisted prefix>Something will do the same for coders who are creating
Twisted "community resources."

d




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