[OSGeo-Conf] Re: Motion Regarding FOSS4G-CEE Name

[Seven (aka Arnulf)]

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On 11.10.2011 00:10, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 10:57 AM, Frank Warmerdam <warmerdam at pobox.com> wrote:
>> Motion: The OSGeo Conference Committee on behalf of OSGeo
>> declares that it has no objection to the name FOSS4G-CEE being
>> used for an open source geospatial conference in central and eastern
>> europe organized by a group including Karel Charvat and Jachym
>> Cepicky.
> 
> Folks,
> 
> I think it has been two business days since I raised this motion.
> It has support from Paul, Peter, Dave, Mauricio, Cameron,
> Markus, Venka and myself with no one expressing a veto or
> a strong negative position.  As such, barring process concerns
> from our chair I declare the motion passed.
> 
> Jachym / Karel - I hope you will treat this as "OSGeo is
> reasonable comfortable with your naming your conference
> FOSS4G CEE".
> 
> Best regards,

...lacking proper process a belated +1 on this from me should be fine. I
do hope that the conference committee will in future be able to decide
this kind of question in a more ordered manner.

Having said that I do believe that we should be somwhat more careful
about defining OSGeo's role in protecting the brand FOSS4G (coming back
to the "brand" in a moment). I concur that OSGeo should not really be a
gatekeeper for the FOSS4G name - and that the OSGeo community at large
should do whatever it deems resectable.

But I do believe that OSGeo should protect the brand FOSS4G in case that
someone starts using it in an ambiguous or misleading way. We started
off with a bad name (OSGeo is way too ambiguous for my liking) and then
already failed to protect it (OpenGeo is way too close to be confused
with OSGeo, especially due to the .org extension) and we all know that
the term "Open (Anything)" is being used in many ways and often not in
the ways intended by the Free Software and Open Source initiatives.
Nothing much we can do about this.

But the brand name "FOSS4G" should be kept clean of such potential
confusion, this is why I believe that we should always think of FOSS4G
as a real trademark brand (no need to register it (tm) though - which
was discussed years ago in other threads). But I do believe that we
should acquire the rights for the foss4g.* domains eu and us but only to
point them back to the main FOSS4G site. It will be so much harder to
claim them back from anyone once they got them with malicious intentions.

So Alex, can you please register .eu and .us for OSGeo asap and point
them to foss4g.org (we can later still proliferate if required).

In my opinion this type of decision should pertain to the marketing
group, what do you think?


Thanks,
Arnulf

- -- 
Exploring Space, Time and Mind
http://arnulf.us
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