This is a repost of an old old blog entry that has become relevant again.
I was hoping to make my next entry one of a technical nature, but the
JBoss™ Group have just asked me to remove the JBoss™ image from the Jetty pages!
The JBoss™ image used has been contributed to the Open Source project and is
available
on sourceforge plus variations of it are distributed with JBoss releases.
For several years, it has been used on the
Jetty home page
and also on the
Jetty Powered page.
Both link through to the JBoss™ project page on sourceforge.
Jetty is the default web tier of JBoss releases
from 3.0 to 3.2.1 and continues to be the web container of choice for many JBoss users.
While I no longer work with JBoss™ Group LLC, I am still very much supportive of the JBoss™
the OS project and continue to maintain the Jetty integration sar (as I am also supportive of
Jetty in Geronimo, JOnAS, Avalon, etc…).
I don’t expect JBoss™ Group LLC to hand out my new business cards for me, but I
do expect an open source project to be administered on a non-discriminatory basis.
Unfortunately the administration of JBoss is falling way short of that:
- My name and photo have been removed from the list of
current and retired JBoss™ contributors. OK, so I’m still in the source and CVS log but
an open source project should not take commercial alliances into consideration when
deciding how much credit to give for contributions. At least the
Wayback Machine remembers
me. - I have been censored out of the jboss-user and jboss-dev mailing lists, even when
my posts are bug reports or answers to user questions. I have posted 2 training
announcements to jboss-user, which I believe is appropriate usage for a list provided
by sourceforge whose moderators
frequently allow
such announcements from a
particular contributor. I certainly have not been trolling the jboss mailing lists
like JBoss Group employees
have trolled
the Jetty lists. - Now it is not OK for an open source project to graphically link to
another open source project because of trademarcs held by an
individual
and
licensed to a particular service provider.
I guess JBoss™ Group LLC have answered
Rickards question
on the server side on the use of trademarcs to control an open source project.
I believe the jetty project has the moral and legal right to use that image. It is
an open source image of a trademarc that has not been enforced, linking to
a project that Jetty made significant contributions to and includes a fork of
the Jetty code.
But rights aside, I do not want to go against the wishes of a copyright holder.
So I have removed the image from the Mort Bay pages and will start the process of
removing them from the next Jetty releases and thus from the jetty pages.
I have also responded to JBoss™ Group asking if Jetty could license the trademarc and
asking what are the not-for-profit non-discriminatory licensing terms. So far the only
response has been along the lines of: just take down the images or we will get legal on
your arse. This is not good enough and I believe JBoss™ Group LLC owe the community
a fair and open policy for the use of the name and image that they have contributed
to. Something like a LinuxMark would be great.
JBoss and JBoss Group are a registered trademark and servicemark of
Marc Fleury
under operation by The JBoss Group, LLC. All similarity between the terms free speech and
free beer is purely coincidental. No copyrights have been harmed in the writing of this blog. Individual
outrage may vary.