Re: [board-discuss] Disappointing trademark pieces
Dear Michael Meeks, Emiliano and me, as members of the special working group of the legal oversight group, [1] have just wrote you an extensive reply to the e-mail you sent to the board and the lawyers in private just a few hours ago. As a board member you regularly (and rightfully) reminded members of TDF’s bodies to not talk about legal topics in public or semi-public channels. We value the long term synergy between TDF and Collabora Productivity and we hope you will make yourself available to discuss the issues you raise and to correct a range of incorrect statements. Me and other members of the board are available for this anytime. Thanks a lot, Paolo and Emiliano [1] https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/2022/msg00837.html On 08/09/2022 17:29, Michael Meeks wrote: Hi there, Recently at Collabora we received a set of demands from a subset of TDF's board with a short deadline to 'correct all possible findings' and to correct "on the indicated pages and on all pages that might contain these or comparable 'infringements'". These demands cover a number of topics that the community has discussed here, and will be of general interest to all Trustees of TDF, they will impact the use of the LibreOffice trademark for the future too, and may be generally interesting for other projects, so we should probably discuss the policy pieces (but not the specific legal aspects) publicly here. I will go over the substance of these findings below, as I understand them, and make the complete original mail available to Trustees. This came from a small subset of TDF's board, along with excerpts of a letter from Chestek Legal. This form of legal disputation is unusual to find next to a claim to be 'friendly' along with a one week deadline. It also had a really unhelpful means of notification, and a requirement to acknowledge receipt. Legal concerns should be sent by TDF to le...@collaboraoffice.com - and not via individual board members who are not responsible for the relevant decisions. * Protecting and nurturing TDF Of course, it is important to protect TDF's LibreOffice trademarks. It is also important to ensure that TDF's resources and trademarks are used to serve TDF's mission: there is no question of that, and we support that. Indeed it is hard to find an entity that supports TDF more than Collabora - we are privileged to be LibreOffice's largest code contributor[1], one of the largest donors, and we help to provide a significant chunk of the mentoring, technical input, volunteer assistance, sponsorship and so on that makes LibreOffice possible. Its safe to say we've contributed substantially to LibreOffice the product, LibreOffice the project, the LibreOffice API (and Kit), the LibreOffice community, LibreOffice as a technology, the LibreOffice file-format across many versions, and many other incarnations of LibreOffice including LibreOffice the product TDF will now sell. Given that - it is curious then to hear the language of legal threat used to make demands - the reasonableness of which we'll examine below. Was that tone really intended ? Normally if there is something wrong, we'd expect a friendly discussion and request. It is well worth pointing out that (in my inexpert, IANAL opinion) Pamela is an excellent lawyer in our domain whom I have commended to others. However, the advice can only be as good as the instruction & brief. That brief & what is subsequently done with the advice would (I imagine) be provided by this (self-appointed?) small board sub-group including: Paolo Vecchi from the legal committee, and Emiliano Vavassori who mailed - I would expect in conjunction with Mike Schinagl as counsel, and Florian Effenberger as Executive Director. * First a little history: Initially (in ~2014), Collabora decided to build and invest in a co-branded product under license from TDF: "LibreOffice-from-Collabora". However this brought with it an unusual level of board criticism / input on our marketing: color schemes, requirements for front-page links to "LibreOffice available for free", and so on - that were sufficiently burdensome, unpredictable and unhelpful that we re-branded to "Collabora Office" in 2015. That change also attracted criticism. Now we come to a similar, but more serious inflection point with a yet wider scope. * The findings: I quote a subset of the points here for brevity and to avoid repetition; though we dispute all of the findings - I will quote the text as if sent by E-mail thus: Chestek Legal writes: Apple app-store: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/collabora-office/id918120011 ** An enterprise version of LibreOffice: The description says "Collabora Office is an enterprise version of LibreOffice, the world’s most popular open-source office productivity suite." It is important to us to credit the LibreOffice project as a whole
[board-discuss] Disappointing trademark pieces
Hi there, Recently at Collabora we received a set of demands from a subset of TDF's board with a short deadline to 'correct all possible findings' and to correct "on the indicated pages and on all pages that might contain these or comparable 'infringements'". These demands cover a number of topics that the community has discussed here, and will be of general interest to all Trustees of TDF, they will impact the use of the LibreOffice trademark for the future too, and may be generally interesting for other projects, so we should probably discuss the policy pieces (but not the specific legal aspects) publicly here. I will go over the substance of these findings below, as I understand them, and make the complete original mail available to Trustees. This came from a small subset of TDF's board, along with excerpts of a letter from Chestek Legal. This form of legal disputation is unusual to find next to a claim to be 'friendly' along with a one week deadline. It also had a really unhelpful means of notification, and a requirement to acknowledge receipt. Legal concerns should be sent by TDF to le...@collaboraoffice.com - and not via individual board members who are not responsible for the relevant decisions. * Protecting and nurturing TDF Of course, it is important to protect TDF's LibreOffice trademarks. It is also important to ensure that TDF's resources and trademarks are used to serve TDF's mission: there is no question of that, and we support that. Indeed it is hard to find an entity that supports TDF more than Collabora - we are privileged to be LibreOffice's largest code contributor[1], one of the largest donors, and we help to provide a significant chunk of the mentoring, technical input, volunteer assistance, sponsorship and so on that makes LibreOffice possible. Its safe to say we've contributed substantially to LibreOffice the product, LibreOffice the project, the LibreOffice API (and Kit), the LibreOffice community, LibreOffice as a technology, the LibreOffice file-format across many versions, and many other incarnations of LibreOffice including LibreOffice the product TDF will now sell. Given that - it is curious then to hear the language of legal threat used to make demands - the reasonableness of which we'll examine below. Was that tone really intended ? Normally if there is something wrong, we'd expect a friendly discussion and request. It is well worth pointing out that (in my inexpert, IANAL opinion) Pamela is an excellent lawyer in our domain whom I have commended to others. However, the advice can only be as good as the instruction & brief. That brief & what is subsequently done with the advice would (I imagine) be provided by this (self-appointed?) small board sub-group including: Paolo Vecchi from the legal committee, and Emiliano Vavassori who mailed - I would expect in conjunction with Mike Schinagl as counsel, and Florian Effenberger as Executive Director. * First a little history: Initially (in ~2014), Collabora decided to build and invest in a co-branded product under license from TDF: "LibreOffice-from-Collabora". However this brought with it an unusual level of board criticism / input on our marketing: color schemes, requirements for front-page links to "LibreOffice available for free", and so on - that were sufficiently burdensome, unpredictable and unhelpful that we re-branded to "Collabora Office" in 2015. That change also attracted criticism. Now we come to a similar, but more serious inflection point with a yet wider scope. * The findings: I quote a subset of the points here for brevity and to avoid repetition; though we dispute all of the findings - I will quote the text as if sent by E-mail thus: Chestek Legal writes: Apple app-store: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/collabora-office/id918120011 ** An enterprise version of LibreOffice: The description says "Collabora Office is an enterprise version of LibreOffice, the world’s most popular open-source office productivity suite." It is important to us to credit the LibreOffice project as a whole of course, and we work hard to do that. That is an inaccurate statement; LibreOffice is well - suited to the enterprise and used by a large number of enterprise users around the world. The statement “Enterprise-wide: one office suite common to your entire environment” is also inaccurate because it suggests that the same version of LibreOffice cannot be deployed across an entire enterprise environment. Yet this flies in the face of the positive TDF marketing plan[2] discussed with the community at length, and approved by the board in 2020 which resulted in empowering our marketing team. eg. https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/ states: "LibreOffice is also great for schools, educational and research institutions, and large
