Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-11-02 at 15:57 -0500, Shawn Walker wrote:
>
>> The community hasn't been given the right to give the name to anybody,
>> or for that matter, take it from anybody. The community explicitly has
>> no rights over the name whatsoever.
>>
>
> so, either one of two things has happened:
>
> 1) the project is a subsidiary part of the community; if the community
> doesn't have the authority to use the name, neither does the project.
>
> 2) the project is not a subsidiary part of the community and has no
> authority to say its output is the work of the community as a whole.
>
>
>> You can't enforce policy that doesn't exist. A policy surrounding the
>> trademark should have been defined at the inception of the community.
>>
>
> until the policy exists, the project can't possibly have authority to
> use the trademark.
>
Of course it can. It gets the authority directly from the mark's owner
(Sun.) The fact that it disenfranchises the entire rest of the
community not to be able to use or control its own name, is entirely
beside the point.
-- Garrett
