Concerning a Statement by the Conservancy (Software Freedom Law Center Blog)

You know that he's the one who wrote this (utterly ridiculous, passive-aggressive and just plain aggressive) response statement, right? SFLC is the organization that is agitating in the way that you are arguing against.

Eben is very much still at the SFLC, and is listed as one of the authors of the post.

This "move along, nothing to see here" statement is breathtaking in its disingenuity. SFLC was happy to coexist with SFC until SFLC drifted so far from its mission that they now publicly disagree with longstanding SFC principles, and then attacked.

If SFLC had a problem with SFC's name, the time to complain was when they became aware of SFC, i.e. at its inception. Not acting at that time lost them any high ground. I am not a lawyer, but as I understand trademark law, that lost them the legal high ground they are now squatting.

That said, being in different industries certainly does tend to mean users are less likely to be confused between two producers of goods/services.

You can see the specific trademark classes (how the USPTO and most countries segment various industries) in the registrations themselves: SFLC is registered in class 45 for "Legal services". Conservancy is registered in classes 35 (Charitable services around FOSS), and class 9 (software products).

Corporations in general are software users and they are fine with "viral" GPL licenses. Those licenses protect the right of software users, they are not in the software distribution business, and they are quite happy to have someone centralizing fixes and enhancements for them (the only sticking point may be the AGPL for internet facing corporate web sites and services). They would in fact pay a little more for upstreaming code since it means they won't have to pay for the same fixes on their next project.

The armies of contractors that write code for those corporations are fine with the concept too. As long as their customer is happy this the licence, they'll be paid regardless of what this licence is.

IT corporations, that's something else entirely. A lot of them adopted "free software" to benefit from "general corporation" purchases, and to get gratis sources of code. But deep down they feel the whole concept would be idiotic to apply to their own activity. They have engaged on a multi-year lobbying effort to water it down to something ineffective that can still be used marketing-side to greenwash their own products. A lot of them are based in California and they've been quite successful in saturating the Silicon Valley echo chamber with their message.

Technically true. Tony Sebro filed the registered trademark application for Conservancy in November 2011. At that particular point Conservancy had indeed become big enough to hire their own General Counsel https://sfconservancy.org/news/2011/sep/30/general-counsel/ but they were still getting legal advice and assistance from others, including the SFLC. And the trademarks had already been in simulations use since 2005. The SFLC had helped them years earlier to file for an independent non-profit under that trademark name in 2006. And the law center only filed for a registered trademark a couple of months earlier in 2011 itself (which was actually done for SFLC by Karen). So at all times were they fully aware of the trademarks as used by themselves and by their client. And that wasn't a problem for more than a decade. But yes, the lawyer of record for the registered trademark for Conservancy was not employed by them. I am note sure that really makes it very honest to suddenly petition for cancellation of that registered trademark years later.

I detest Eben's current actions. They strike me as thoroughly unprincipled, backbiting, and carried out with unclean hands. But the Eben who appeared to die here also lived, and had many years of immense contributions to free software. That's one of the great tragedies of this affair, and ample reason for those with whom he struggled over a generation and more for free software to grieve. However, those contributions endure.

I suspect that the forces of "mainstream" respectability eventually came to overwhelm the outsider status into which the mainstream has always tried to place the GPL. It's certainly going to be the default perspective of the Columbia law faculty and that of corporate boards and the types with which one would socialize within the Linux Foundation. The temptation to "influence from within" must be immense, whatever the capitulation it represents. And probably that is not fully consciously realized, if even at all. It's a perspective which saturates the talk Moglen gave which has been referred to earlier.

And the Linux Foundation has grown in resources rapidly and exerts to a certain type a respectability according to its cash flow: it's been upping its executive salaries by 20% a year and now processes gross receipts of almost $40 million per year. Its external legal fees alone approached $750k in 2015, and from Zemlin's $645k (second only to Torvalds) to young whipper snapper Michael Dolan's $343k, its top-paid employees are very, very well paid indeed.

Upton Sinclair gave a great maxim: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Now Eben's salary is guaranteed, but not the social standing within this management caste. Consciousness appears here to have eventually been determined by environment, as it is all too often.

You see a sociopath screws people over without even knowing it and people do not like that, so it takes extraordinary circumstances for a sociopath to be long lived within any organisation.