Although the GPE project authors and contributors recently moved their hosting needs to linuxtogo, some handhelds.org administrators believe that they personally own the projects that are or were hosted there. A person who goes by the name France George decided to trademark GPE, Opie ad IPKG.
Unluckily Mr. France started to work with these trademarks already even if they are not assigned yet:
- The OpieII project had to change its name.
- Contributors were threatened and urged to give up the name GPE
- The GPE IRC channel (#gpe) at freenode.net was hijacked
- Freenode staff members were threatened when they decided to give #gpe back
I hope free software supporters with legal knowledge from all over the world will offer their skills to the people who worked on the many excellent GPE components. Let’s not allow people to steal project names.
Florian Boor, one of the GPE developers, blogged in “Threatened, how do we protect our projects” the open question to all of you: How do we get the affected projects out of this situation? Or maybe even more important: How can we reduce the risk for something like this happening again?
I think this is a good case to bring up to the EFF or groklaw for counsel.