A potpourri of intellectual property concerns raised by recent investigations:
1. Brand - Who owns the ArgoUML name, trademarks, logos, etc? While investigating the last Eclipse plugin (circa 2003) I discovered a link on the Sygel site to argouml.com which I assumed wouldn't work, but to my surprise it does. It currently redirects to Tigris, but that would be a great "submarine" strategy for someone lying in wait until the brand achieved enough commercial value. That web site appears to be owned by a company called "Method Labs." 2. IP Provenance - What are the project rules for ownership, provenance (chain of ownership), etc of things contributed to the project? How are these rules (if any) enforced? An example of the type of thing relevant here is the Apache CLA http://apache.org/licenses/#clas. Does anyone know if the companies who've done closed source forks have done independent due diligence on the source pool or are they all just winging it and hoping for the best? 3. License - The BSD license is certainly flexible, but it has some drawbacks too. One thing that we have historically been unable to do is achieve any type of commercial / open-source partnership or symbiosis. All of the commercial ventures based on ArgoUML (Poseidon, MyEclipse, Sygel) have been closed source forks which have taken source code (and sometimes developers), but never given anything back. Using a license with a different balance of rights and responsibilities like the CPL or EPL, might encourage a better mix of contributors in the community. Of course, whether or not we have the flexibility to use a different license will depend on the answer to topic #2. Another approach to more successful interaction with commercial ventures would be to build ourselves up to a size that makes doing any type of fork infeasible (a la Apache), but that would seem difficult to achieve. There's been some talk of formalizing the organization of the ArgoUML project and each of these topics would be critically important in that context, but they're also relevant to our current project structure. Tom --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
