Hi Jonathan,
Le 2020-07-08 à 12:12, Jonathan Riddell a écrit :
Recently we've noticed some KDE apps ending up on the Microsoft Store
uploaded by unknown third parties. Maybe to up some credit score for
their developer account. Maybe to install bitcoin miners. We don't
know the motivations. Since it's all free software the licence allows it.
One option is to claim Trademark on all our app names. This isn't
hard, we just add the ™ onto the name anywhere we have it on our
website starting with kde.org/applications
<http://kde.org/applications>. Some apps such as KOffice have done
this in the past anyway. This doesn't cost anything, only a registered
trademark (which uses the ®. logo) costs money. It might give us more
ability to take down random people posting our software on app
stores. It might also make us look more corporate than we want to
look and put off Linux distros from shipping our software.
Should we add ™ next to the app names?
As others have pointed out, depending on what precisely you are trying
to prevent, there may be other avenues than trademarking.
That being said, to answer your actual question, I would treat this in
several elements:
1. Do we want to trademark the names of more KDE products (I say "more"
since "KDE" is already trademarked, so arguably at least one product
is already trademarked). I personally have no strong opinion, but I
agree that trademarking can discourage modification. There are ways
to mitigate that, including publishing a trademark policy, offering
a contact point to ask about the acceptability of changes, and
facilitating renaming, for example by adding a compilation option to
set a different name. I would also suggest committing to publish a
list of all trademark enforcement actions done, so those who
consider modifying can get an idea of what will actually be accepted
or not.
2. If we do agree to trademark more names, which names? We tend to have
lots of names for lots of projects, many of which I suppose may take
a while to be sufficiently important to justify trademarking. I
propose a wiki page as a way to list candidates and poll developers
about each.
3. For those names we do trademark, how much should the ™ symbol be
used? I would not like seeing it everywhere, but I do not mind
seeing it in the About screen, for instance.
4. Who would own those trademarks?
Jonathan
--
Philippe Cloutier
http://www.philippecloutier.com
