Stealing Open Source Projects' Names

3 points by klrr 13y ago ↗ HN

As you may know, the game studio Illfonic made a dirty deal with Alientrap and bought the rights to a games title. There was no law violations of course. The problem was that the title was the name of an open source game which by the time was almost completely community developed. (You can read the full story here: http://www.xonotic.org/the-game/faq/#What_prompted_the_split_from_Nexuiz )

This is happening again.

The open source game Termulous is experience a similar situation now. There's a new game by the title Termulous 2 that is a remake of the game. But, the new version is neither open source, neither free nor even available to all the platforms the original game supported. The developers of original Termulous ain't happy.

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samwillis 13y ago ↗

This is why it is important for the for the founders of a successful open source project to register the trade mark. See the current issue with the python trademark in Europe for another example. It may be possible to still register the trade mark if you can supply evidence that the open source project came first and it could confuse your customers, again see what the python guys are doing in there case.