Andreas Jung wrote:
What is the current status of the ZF?
The process is proceeding swiftly, and hopefully smoothly. We have draft
documents of the TM Agreement and the By-Laws, and are well along the
way to drafts of the IP Policy and the remaining documents.
We have formed a small committee of some representative groups in the
Zope community, cutting across interests and geography, and we have IRC
meetings to make sure that at the highest level, the initial documents
will represent a broad community interest.
Before the actual formation of the Foundation, we will post all of the
relevant documents for public comment, so those that are not on the
current committee will still get a chance to weigh in before the By-Laws
(for example) become final. Even after that, the Membership can alter
the By-Laws in the future, so this is just the "starting point".
It's still quite possible that everything will be wrapped up by the end
of October (as originally projected), but we did have the delay in
starting (more on that below) and there's still a lot to do, so it could
slip a bit, but we certainly are doing everything in our power to make
that date.
Any progress happened on the outstanding trademark issue with ZEA?
I was hoping to avoid this topic in public, given the heat it generated
in the past. However, it doesn't seem fair to avoid a direct question,
given some recent turns.
We have had _numerous_ discussions (all in email) with two members of
ZEA. We came to an agreement and all seemed perfectly on target, which
is why we began all of the other ZF documents and committee meetings, etc.
Unfortunately, ZEA never delivered a single draft of the proposed
transfer documents, even though they said that the documents already
existed for the Plone trademark transfer.
We have been amazingly patient, and have waited _weeks_ between attempts
to remind them, bug them, etc. Each time, we get a "sorry, we don't know
how much longer it will be, but it shouldn't be much longer."
This week, we informed ZEA that we had restarted our original legal
challenge to their TM filing, as we simply can't understand the delay
and complete lack of communication.
Since the legal challenge is likely to take significantly longer than a
contractual transfer, it is not possible to have that completed by the
time the Foundation would be ready to be launched. Our original plan
(which caused the previous public ruckus) was to hold off on the
Foundation until this was resolved.
This week, before we restarted the legal process, Rob Page made an
alternate proposal internally, which seems reasonable to me. While we
haven't officially decided to do this, it is very likely that we will:
In the event that we have not secured the transfer of the TM
registrations from ZEA by the time the Foundation is launched, the
Foundation will _not_ have an initial TM license from ZC. The Foundation
will still exist, and might get a more limited TM license from ZC, or
perhaps even none at all. Whenever the ZEA TM matter is resolved, we'll
proceed with the correct TM license for the Foundation.
I'm very sorry to be reporting the above. The people that we have worked
with at ZEA have been very reasonable, and have come to an amicable
solution with a minimum of hassle on either side. Unfortunately, they
have simply failed to deliver even a single draft page of a document for
us to review, and that is no longer an acceptable situation.
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