(no title)
vickychijwani | 4 years ago
My understanding so far is that they run a Postgres consulting firm [1], and it appears they took the liberty of registering a Postgres trademark for the class of "professional services" in order to (I presume) protect fair use by their firm and (they claim in their response) by others in the Postgres community.
Some of this is admittedly speculation on my part, and I'm trying to take a charitable view of their actions to try to understand why a community member would do this.
That said I have no opinion on whether this action is net good for the community, and I'm not a Postgres user so I have no horse in this race. It's just the social dynamics of this situation that are interesting to me.
ahachete|4 years ago
As the post states, with dates, there has never been any communication from them to discuss this matter. Only through laywers, since day 0. Even some of them, long-time personal friends of mine, where shut of and were banned to communicate even at a personal level. Not even with laywers present.
There was no need to make all this public. This clearly hurts the Community.
As the post says, there's no explanation to why PEU, who is as legit as any other non-profit Postgres association, including Fundación PostgreSQL, can hold trademarks and not being sued and publicly bashed.
If PEU can hold trademarks, why can't Fundación? Conversely: if there should be one trademark holder (and we agree, read the proposal we submitted to them which got no reply!) then it should be a legal entity with more solid grounds than current Core's Group (which has no legal entity behind) or PAC, which is a quite opaque association too.
kbenson|4 years ago
That's sort of a nonsensical take. Of course people with any sort of connection to the other side would be advised not to speak to you without a lawyer, and not to speak with a lawyer if they had nothing legally relevant to add. Your actions with regard to copyright were legal in nature, you should expect a legal response.
I think the very valid question in this is were you contacted in 2020 and told to cease and desist using a legal trademark by the current owners, and did you fail to do so? If that's true, I'm not sure what defense you have. As I see it, the only responsible action at that time if you really care about the issues you raise would be to cease and desist and open an dialogue that is not subject to legal proceedings and their need to defend their copyright lest they lose it.
> there should be one trademark holder (and we agree, read the proposal we submitted to them which got no reply!) then it should be a legal entity with more solid grounds than current Core's Group (which has no legal entity behind) or PAC, which is a quite opaque association too.
That's not for you to decide. The correct way to go about that is not to make the holding entity and then try to surreptitiously acquire the trademark, but to have approached the community first. Did you approach the community prior to attempting to take over an aspect of their management and holdings, or not? If you did, what was the response?
mbreese|4 years ago
Of course they will only talk via lawyers! That's what they have to do to make sure that all communication is clear, documented, and not misinterpreted (by either party). Once the problem escalates to be a legal dispute, this is the only way communication can happen.
And as soon as this escalates to a lawsuit, the existence of the dispute will be public.
>If PEU can hold trademarks, why can't Fundación?
No one is saying that they/you can't hold trademarks. You just can't register ones that would be confusing to the public (which is the purpose of trademarks -- to avoid public confusion). And honestly, even the domain name postgr.es is confusing.
From the PostgreSQL EU website (as linked by you), these are their specific trademarks:
PGConf, PGDay, Postgres Conference, PostgreSQL Conference
These don't seem to be confusing about what the database itself is called, or how the project is managed. Trying to trademark "PostgreSQL" and "PostgreSQL Community" is way too confusing with respect to the primary project. You're basically trying to take over the global naming rights for the entire project. Whatever the relationship is between Postgres Core and PostgreSQL EU (and it is a bit opaque), that's not for you to judge and it has no bearing on what rights you feel Fundación has to the trademark "Postgres" or "PostgreSQL".
One reason why you're getting slammed so hard on this is that these have been hard learned lessons in the FOSS community over the past few decades. Trademarks are one of the few FOSS-compatible ways to protect projects, names, and publicity -- especially against commercial entities that may not have the best intentions. They must be defended in order to protect these projects.
And I'm sorry, but the global stability of the Postgres project is far more important than whatever good intentions you had.
exikyut|4 years ago
The way I read/understand this comment is that
1) you took the cue of PEU registering trademarks in Europe to take the initiative and set up shop in Spain with the visibility of a locally-held trademark by a carefully-chosen representational entity (foundation)
and then
2) there has never been an opportunity to have an open-ended conversation about the events in (1).
Without further context (which may completely derail my theory and leave me very disoriented :) ), I get the impression that the other organization(s) were not expecting any of this to take place, and have subsequently reacted to it as though it were a threat.
If there *was* prior communication/discussion/negotiation, then I have no idea why they're responding like this.