Hi, I have a question concerning trademark name infringement for a GPL software I and a colleagues are working on. The company OpenCFD (http://www.cfd-online.com/) issued software for Computational Fluids Dynamics (CFD) called 'OpenFOAM' under the GPL license (http://www.openfoam.com/). The abbreviation FOAM is an invent of the company and means "Field Operation And Manipulation".
We have modernized the entire configuration / compilation system of this software using CMake. In order to publish our improvements we have issued the software package under the name 'FreeFOAM', referring to the company, the original software and keeping all author rights in the existing files (http://freefoam.sourceforge.net/). We issued a new project because it already was widely known that OpenCFD refuses to include improvements, extensions etc of the code in their original releases unless the author will abandon all rights of his work. IMHO not needed nor allowed for GPL software. Thanks to this work, I have been able to debianize the software relatively quite easily and hope to get it into GNU/Debian soon once a formal FreeFOAM release has been issued and I have found a sponsor. Recently another user started the "OpenFOAM Documentation Project" (ODP) and promptly received a letter of thread to bring the project to court because of trademark infringement. Because of this and because the author of ODP had been threaded to be exiled from the user community forums, the ODP project was forced to go down. As we feel that FreeFOAM is now in a similar situation we also fear to receive a similar letter of legal thread of trademark infringement. My question is how to handle in such a situation? So far, We have different options: 1) Wait until we will receive such a thread. The advance is we can keep the FreeFOAM name that associates the project with the original OpenFOAM project and will not break-up its large user community. The drawback is uncertainty and fear. 2) Change the name of the project. Would this be sufficient to avoid trademark name infringement? 3) Or is it required to change the name of the project and all its libraries, binaries, file names etc. that include the word 'FOAM'? This would bring a lot of work and maintenance, among synchronization with the OpenFOAM project. Probably the history of the git repo will be (partly) lost. 4) Another option is to write the company asking for a letter of declaration it will not pose a thread against the FreeFOAM project because of trademark name infringement. Is this done before and, if so, what are the experiences? Will such a letter hold in court once the company will decide to pose a legal thread? Some other questions remain: Will the domain name for a software project give legal rights as primary owner of a (trademark) name? Or, to put it in other words: is legal trademark registration of GPL software required? If so, how to do this? What are the costs? Any recommendations or suggestions are welcome. Gerber van der Graaf -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/1290094288.6053.20.ca...@hamburg.upc.es