Hi Tom,
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."
I am the originator of the ArgoUML name and logo. I never registered it as a trademark, but I did publish technical papers and websites that clearly link the name to me and the project, and I did do a trademark search before first use of the name to be sure that no one else already had it or anything closely related. I also own argouml.org and argouml.com. "Method Labs" is a small company that I started to do something else, but I consider all the websites that I have registered to be a business expense of Method Labs. I have no intention of misusing the brand or the domain names, or letting them expire.
2. IP Provenance - What are the project rules for ownership, provenance (chain of ownership), etc of things contributed to the project? How are
Frankly, we did not do a good job of this, and now I think that the cat is out of the bag and cannot really be put back in. Much of the code is marked with a copyright by the Regents of the University of California, but contributors have not officially signed it over to UC Regents and it is probably infeasable to go back and get all contributors to sign one now.
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
Linus is the project leader now, but my thoughts on licensing as project founder is that BSD or Apache style licenses are by far the best. I don't want to go too far to try to prevent forks, especially not commercial forks. Keep in mind that there are larger goals at stake than the success of this OSS project. Trying to do everything to make just this one project succeed seems rather vain. My goal in creating ArgoUML in the first place was to help promote good software engineering practices broadly throughout the industry, and to provide a basis on which more OOAD tools could be built. There is a wide range of users out there, and they need a wide range of tools available to them. Many OOAD users prefer commercial support, so I am happy to see vendors create and sell their own unique value-add and be rewarded for it. Encouraging more small tool vendors is great for the industry in the long run, IMO. There have also been many contributors who did give back, and those that did not probably would not have if they were forced to, so I don't feel that we are missing out on anything. Thanks, jason! -- Jason Robbins, Ph.D. Tigris.org Community Developer --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
