[Juriwiki-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation of our 'MediaWiki' mark

[Delirium]

Rowan Collins wrote:

>I believe there *is* some ambiguity over the status of the term
>"MediaWiki", though - the place to look is
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_trademarks, although I can't
>access it right now - since not all the developers (who collectively
>own the copyright to the software, and thus logically its name and
>'brand') agree that the Wikimedia Foundation should be considered the
>owners of that mark. What that means in terms of "policing" the mark,
>I'm not entirely sure...
>  
>
Indeed, it's generally considered best-practice in the open-source world 
to *not* be tight-fisted with one's software names, since that tends to 
be used as a tool to stifle forks.  When Emacs was forked to make 
XEmacs, the Free Software Foundation did not sue the XEmacs developers 
for using their trademark.  Occasionally software does have requirements 
that any forks change the name (e.g. Knuth's TeX), but people complain 
about those requirements a lot, and I wouldn't say they're 
well-liked---especially when multiple people are the authors of the 
original work (as with MediaWiki), rather than one company like in 
MySQL's case.

-Mark