[Zope] Re: Re: Zope Foundation Update
"Chris Withers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] This has to be one of the more ill-informed, offensive posts that I have seen from a member of the Zope community, and that's saying a lot. It's obvious that there's a good ventriloquist pulling Chris' strings, since he's making assertions that are so easily proven incorrect that they are laughable. > I'm not sure muppetism applies to the Zope community, it appears to be > Zope Corporation who are coming out of this looking less than clever. Yes, of course, we are looking less than clever. We offer up a Foundation. We give all of our ZPL copyrighted code to this Foundation. We give committers free membership and an equal number of board seats to vendors who pay for those board seats. Somehow, we're "bad guys" in this. I agree. Trying to work with some of the people in this community make me personally feel less than clever... ZEA takes marks _directly from our website_, registers them as their own, and they are "white knights". You're a genius. > It's a shame, because really, they should be the ones benefitting from the > community they've created, but instead they're more and more isolating > themselves from a community which is finally starting to realise that > Zope's continued popularity is not predicated on the survival of Zope > Corporation. See above. More and more we are isolating ourselves, by joining sprints internationally, contributing our code to a Foundation that _we_ are bringing to the community, and by offering to participate completely in the ECM project as well. I can see how this is isolationist. Again, you're a genius. > I hope Lois in particular reads this and understands that you can't bully > an open source community, and doing so is likely going have much worse > consequences for the bully in the medium to long term than it will for the > people being bullied. And now, for the ultimate in idiocy. Lois has not _once_ communicated directly with the "community" on anything other than announcements regarding training. Certainly, she has never "bullied" the community on any topic, including the Foundation. So, how do I know you are being manipulated into making stupid public statements? Someone obviously had to tell you that Lois was involved in the ZEA discussions. Want to know how? Probably not, since you were stupid enough to parrot someone else's words, but for the benefit of everyone else who has a brain, and cares to really understand the truth, here goes: Rob and I had the only interactions with any ZEA members, and they were _exclusively_ with Xavier Heymans and Paul Everitt. After one exchange with Paul, he requested to be let out of the continued discussions due to potential conflicts of interest (which we respected). Lois received an email out of the clear blue from another ZEA member (who had not been on any of the emails between Rob, Paul, Xavier and myself). He reached out to Lois asking her to participate in a conference call with him, another ZEA member (also not on any previous communications) and Xavier. Rob and I were not invited to participate in this call. Lois was _not_ in the loop on our side either previous to this attempt to reach out to her. The three ZEA members discussed the issue with Lois for 70 minutes. I doubt they reached out to her because they thought she was the "bully" in our bunch. At the end of the conversation, Lois came to Rob and I and supported some of the requests that ZEA made in terms of compensation for the transfer. The amount that was originally requested (20,000 EUROS, plus additional "transfer fees") was absurd to me, and even though Lois was willing to find a middle ground, she was the "messenger" that related to them that "management" rejected their offer. Three days later, Lois wrote back a note to Xavier (this past Friday), again playing the messenger, with a offer to pay any expenses that we otherwise would have had to pay to be the original registrars of the marks. It is my contention that if someone steals something from you, you shouldn't have to pay them a premium to get it back, should you? We have had no response to that note, and we informed them more than a week in advance that we would make this matter public if they didn't respond. Obviously, they didn't mind it being made public, or they would have found a way to work it out. Now, let's continue with the history lesson, this time concentrating on me, rather than Lois. I invested in Zope Corporation (then Digital Creations) in October 1998. I was the largest investor (using my personal money) then, and through two additional rounds of funding remain the largest single personal investor (by a long shot!). So, my money is where my mouth is in this company. It was _me_, and me alone that suggested in November of 1998 that we open source the software (before it was even called Zope). It was me that discussed the licensing issues with Bruce Perens to come up with ZPL 1.0.
[Zope] Re: Re: Zope Foundation Update
"Chris Withers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Florent Guillaume wrote: >> The current state of what ZC proposes doesn't prevent anyone from doing >> anything reasonable. >> >> "Give them your hand, and they'll ask for your arm"... > > Indeed. I don't have any problem with ZC keeping the trademarks, but why > are they tying the creation of the foundation onto their retreival of > their lost marks? > > The two seem totally unconnected to me... Considering that we have agreed to license our marks to the Foundation, and that the lawyers tell us that this is the first step, we have to have _clear title_ to them in order to have a valid license agreement. If there's an ongoing trademark dispute, then we can't cleanly license the marks to the Foundation. It seemed obvious to us in our post that we were explaining this, but it must not have been clear enough. Is it clear now? ___ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )
[Zope] Re: Re: Zope Foundation Update
Matt, unfrotuntately (for me), you make a number of very good points, so I will break my self-imposed silence to respond ;-) Unfortunately for everyone else, this continues the thread, but at least it feels to me like we're "de-escalating" and hopefully actually getting somewhere good, faster... "Matt Hamilton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Hadar Pedhazur wrote: >> Beyond that point, _we_ are the first registrants of the >> ZOPE trademark in WIPO. ZEA registered our LOGO, not the >> word ZOPE, which we registered _before_ they registered the >> LOGO. So, everyone, please pay attention. We did _not_ >> ignore our trademark rights in Europe. We registered our >> base trademark, the word ZOPE, in a number of countries in >> Europe. ZEA then registered our LOGO (taken from our >> website), including the name ZOPE in it (which we had >> already registered). >> >> I am truly unsure as to how to make this point any clearer. > > A few points I want to clear up... the next two paragraphs I write are > about technicalities, I am not refering to any moral right or wrong, or > who did what etc. > > In my view the confusion is apparent. If I go to zope.org I see the same > logo (admittedly with the word community added to it). If I install Zope > and go to the ZMI one of the first things I see is the Zope logo. I can > clearly see how people associate the logo with the software. Very few > clients (and potential clients) we talk to in the UK are even aware of > ZC... *in their mind* Zope is a CMS not a company. You are absolutely correct. In certain usages, we try to make the distinction obvious (like Community being part of the logo, and certainly in adding "Corporation" in our own logo). That said, our "Logo Usage" page on zope.com, which has been there for a _very_ long time, makes it clear that we own the trademark for _all_ variations of the mark, and that we _freely_ license it (without any signatures!) for certain usage, and license it under a contract for all other usages (most of those are free too!): http://www.zope.com/about_us/legal/zope_logo_usage.html The point is that even the logo in the free Zope software is "owned" by us. It just happens to be freely licensed, with no fee or contract. That doesn't make it available to be registered as an owned trademark by someone else. We don't care if potential clients of yours don't associate the logo with us, that's obviously fine. We _do_ care if they associate the logo with ZEA and nobody else. If they associate it with Zope the software, that's fine too, and doesn't require a license, but that still leaves us as the owners of the mark. > And please please please remember that there is no such thing as > 'registered the trademark in Europe'. There are many companies in Europe > and the trademarks have to be registered in specific countries. Again, you are correct. I noted in my previous response to you that you were also correct that we picked countries that were economically interesting to us. >> Read the above response again (and again if necessary). More >> importantly, ask yourself why ZEA admitted to us during a >> phone call that they believe that there were deals that they >> could not have won if they didn't control the mark? Now >> extend that thought one more inch and ask yourself how the >> Zope-based companies that they competed against in Europe >> would feel if they knew that this was a commercial leverage >> point for ZEA in winning against their bid?!?!? > > You are twisting the truth here -- I wish I had recorded the phone call > now to prevent the chinese whispers :) On the call to Lois, Xavier said > that there are certain possibilities of using Zope for EU projects which > would be hampered by a corporation (ie ZC) owning the trademark to the OSS > software. ZEA does not want the trademark. Repeat. ZEA does not want > the trademark. Huh? ZEA does not represent everyone in the Zope Community (as Rob has already pointed out) and worse, does not even represent all commercial Zope companies in Europe. How does ZEA holding the trademark make an EU project "less hampered" than ZC holding it? You can keep repeating that ZEA doesn't want the trademark, and yet, you registered it... >> it's utterly obvious that even the more basic of the "facts" >> are still misunderstood by a number of posters. As an >> example, the repeated questioning of why we didn't register >> our own marks in Europe, which we did. > > Yes, you are still mis-understanding the facts. Europe consists of many > countries, of which you registered the mark in just six - Germany, > Denmark, Spain, France, Great Britain and Italy. This is the third time that I am publicly agreeing that we made a choice. > ZEA then went on to further protect the mark registering it in: Austria, > Bulgaria, Switzerland, Cyrus, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, > Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Ukraine Real
