Whose project is it anyway?

A project's name is its identity which embodies all of the good (or bad) will that the software and its developers have built up over time. In order to protect it, a project will sometimes register a trademark for the name allowing them to control who uses it. If someone outside of the project tries to grab that control by registering the trademark, especially without consulting the development team, sparks will fly. That is just what we are seeing in a dispute between handhelds.org and two of the projects associated with it.

As one might guess from the name, handhelds.org is essentially a portal for open source, typically Linux-based, software for small embedded devices, mostly PDAs. It provides CVS repositories, bug tracking, mailing lists and other developer services to a handful of projects related to handheld devices. The GPE Palmtop Environment (GPE) and the Open Palmtop Integrated Environment (Opie) provided a user interface including some Personal Information Management (PIM) applications for PDAs. Both projects were developed using the facilities at handhelds.org, but it is apparent that there is a disconnect between the projects and the portal: is handhelds.org just a hosting site like SourceForge or is it something more? That question is at the heart of the disputes.

In August of 2006, several GPE Palmtop Environment (GPE) developers proposed moving the project from handhelds.org to a relatively new site called Linux-To-Go (LTG). The stated reasons for the move were somewhat vague, but it clearly was an attempt by those developers to gain more control over the hosting of the project and which development tools were used. It was perceived to be a power grab by some and was not met with wholehearted acceptance, but the main detractors were people associated or affiliated with handhelds.org rather than core GPE developers.

Another round of mailing list flames came about in October when the move to LTG actually started to happen. As with any acrimonious split, there were accusations of various sorts being thrown around, the GPE developers were accused of deleting the CVS repository on handhelds.org while handhelds.org was alleged to have deleted user accounts, links to the new site and mailing list messages. The transition seems to have gone well for LTG as most or all of the GPE developers moved over to the new site.

All of that bickering is well in the past now, the GPE project has moved on, and handhelds.org continues to host various projects, but a dispute over an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel has recently rekindled the flames. The administrators at freenode surely had no idea what they were stepping into when they acted on a renaming request from handhelds.org and pointed the #gpe channel at #handhelds-gpe. The #gpe channel had been in use by the project at LTG, and a request to control the channel had been made by LTG in November but had not yet been acted upon. When freenode discovered the problem they restored the channel to the LTG folks and promptly received an email from handhelds.org claiming GPE as their trademark. At that point, freenode took the channel away from both awaiting a resolution of the dispute.

It turns out that in March, George France, CEO of Handhelds.org Inc., which is the non-profit company that runs the website, applied to register trademarks for several of the projects that are hosted there. GPE and Opie were two of those projects. Then in mid-May under cover of an innocuous CVS comment, France changed the handhelds.org legal page to include a statement claiming that GPE, Opie and another 11 projects as "Trademarks of Handhelds.org, Inc."

France claims that GPE and Opie were always trademarks of handhelds.org and the registration is just to clean up the legalities of the matter:

The GPE folks claim that the name GPE pre-dates hosting on handhelds.org and that the active project should be the one to hold the trademark, as all handhelds.org ever did was provide hosting services. France never consulted with either project regarding registering the trademarks, presumably because he believed them to be already the property of handhelds.org. It seems fairly presumptuous to claim a project's name, even for the most altruistic of reasons, without consulting the people whose code embodies that project.

Whether the handhelds.org folks wish to acknowledge it or not, the active GPE project is now hosted at LTG. The GPE mailing list archives show no activity of consequence at handhelds.org since April whereas the LTG list is fairly active. Under those circumstances it seems disingenuous to suggest, as some handhelds.org folks have, that the LTG project is a fork and should therefore change its name. GPE has moved rather than forked.

Opie seems to have gotten caught in the GPE crossfire to some extent. The project itself was not very active when one of the earlier developers tried to start an OpieII project that would update the code to Qt4. His choice of hosting it at LTG was at least partially to blame for a request from handhelds.org that he not use the name OpieII as it infringes upon the Opie trademark. This led to yet another flame-filled thread about handhelds.org usurping a project's name, but it also led to a possible solution to the whole mess. One of the original Opie founders stepped in and has come up with a possible resolution where he will be licensed to use the Opie name and will host an Opie development site separate from handhelds.org (though still affiliated as opie.handhelds.org). In addition, a community council for handhelds.org would be formed and a code of conduct would be created to try and avoid these kind of situations in the future. One might hope this model could lead to better relations between GPE and handhelds.org, but egos on both sides would make that an unlikely scenario.

If a loose collection of developers comes together and starts contributing code to a project, one would think that they would be entitled to own the trademark on the name they chose. But unless the project puts together some kind of governing structure and applies for a trademark at or near day one, there can always be questions about the name. Does it belong to the founders, the current developers or the site that hosts their CVS repository? How do you define who is a "member" so that the governing structure adequately represents the interests of the "community"? These are difficult questions and are probably about the last thing a group of hackers wants to deal with at the initial stages of a project. In many cases, it is too early to tell if the project will even get going enough that it makes sense to spend any time on governance issues.

Trademarks are a bit of a double-edged sword, they can protect a project from someone misrepresenting the code, a spyware infested browser called Firefox for instance, but there needs to be some kind of entity that administers and enforces the mark. It would be difficult for someone completely unrelated to a project to register the trademark and hope to have it stick, as William Della Croce found out with the Linux trademark in 1996, but it costs real money to wrest the trademark back, and a free software project is unlikely to have that easily at hand. This is an issue that project leaders need to at least think about as their projects mature.