Hi, sorry to be a little late on this thread. We will definitely discuss
this tomorrow during the Jabber Foundation text conference and that's
probably the best forum to continue this discussion. As StPeter has posted,
we're going to have two meetings tomorrow, at 12pm Mountain (18 UTC) and 4pm
Mountain (22 UTC). Not sure there's a correlation there or not. :)
So, the details are still being worked out, but, yes, the Jabber Foundation
will help manage the use of Jabber as a trademark on behalf of the Jabber
Community. This was part of the impetus to establish the Jabber Foundation.
It's a fine line to walk in managing an "open source brand". Jabber.com
doesn't have all the answers but perhaps together through the Foundation we
can do this. Certainly this should take something of a back seat to getting
the protocol documented.
Please understand that there are just some fundamental realities that any
trademark holder (whether it's Linus, Jer, or anyone else for that matter)
has to deal with. The purpose of a trademark is to provide a consumer with
confidence in a product. As such, the law compels the trademark owner to
insure commercial product offerings aren't confused with one another.
There's already some confusion between who and what is Jabber and what we
have to do is clarify things. We've looked at a lot of options and think
that we can do the right things for everyone concerned with the proper
licensing.
So, I think what we're going to do at the Foundation should be pretty
exciting. As Iain has suggested, what we're looking forward to doing is to
come up with a kind of "Jabber Inside" mark that everyone can use ("Got
Jabber?" :). You'd only have to go to the Jabber Foundation to get the
mark. If we can all rally around something cool, we should all benefit.
There's already a great deal of brand recognition for Jabber. We
collectively don't want to dilute it, much less lose it. In fact, we should
want to do everything we can to strenghten it. If we don't protect it, we
lose it.
A little background. Apparently, the original trademark owner was going to
serve a cease-and-desist on Jer et. al. to stop using Jabber. Jabber.com
bought the trademark and prevented that. So, I think jabber.com has
established a track record of trying to do what's right with respect to the
use of Jabber. We're going to work things out where the "non-commercial"
open source community will be able to use Jabber freely, but in a way that
helps the protect the quality of the brand.
In the end, the number one concern is maintaining the highest quality
standards possible. It can be argued that yes, even the image of Linux has
been tarnished because of some Linux-related failures. You kind of don't
want "fly-by-night" giving your efforts a black eye. So, we'll need to
manage the mark a little more like Apache, or Java, I think. This does have
an impact on what people can use for product and company names but f you
have specific questions about commercial use, you should contact me
directly.
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