discuss: Bento Poetic License (resubmission)

[Thatcher Ulrich]

* Michael St . Hippolyte <mash at brooklyndigital.net>:
>  On 2002.07.19 20:12 John Cowan wrote:
> > 
> > There are, however, other ways to do it.
> > 
> > 1) License the code under an ordinary Open Source license, whichever
> > one you like.  License the trademark "Bento" only to people whose
> > implementation meets your definition.
>  
>  There are a number of reasons why we believe trademark enforcement
>  is not as good an option.  Bento is a free language, in both the
>  free-speech and free-beer senses of the term.  Trademarks are
>  designed to protect commercial interests, and Bento has arguably
>  no commercial value, since anyone can get it or give it away for
>  free.
>  
>  Trademarks are like patents in that they are expensive to
>  secure and expensive to defend, and if you don't defend them you
>  forfeit them.  But as a free language, Bento can't afford a
>  trademark lawyer.

Trademarks are easy to acquire, no?  You just use the name, and put
(tm) next to it.  You're right that it's the registration & defending
that costs money & effort.  But much much less than patents, in my
limited experience.

>  More fundamentally, our goal is not to replicate the stingy approach
>  Sun takes with Java, but to turn things around and make freedom the
>  default case.  I got busted a few years ago by Sun's lawyers for a
>  library I wrote called JavaMidi.  The only one allowed to call any
>  piece of software Java-anything is Sun.  We don't want that with
>  Bento.  We want the presumption to be that it's OK to do what you
>  want with Bento, both the software and the term.  Rather than
>  specify what you can call Bento, we want to specify, very narrowly,
>  what you can't call Bento, namely works derived from our copyrighted
>  material which fail a particular test but are represented otherwise.

What's wrong with the Perl Artistic License?  If the situation you
fear has not affected Perl (or has it...), why do you think it would
affect Bento?

Another possibility to consider: Copyright does not protect you from
someone writing their own independent implementation, not derived from
your code, and claiming it's Bento-compatible (regardless of whether
it actually is).  The problem here is that your copyright license has
no bearing on them, since they're not using your software.

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich
http://tulrich.com


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