[Uml-devel] Before releasing umbrello 1.1...

[P. Fleury]

Note: the length of this discussion is not related to its importance or 
level of urgency :-)

Sebastian Stein wrote:

>>On another train of thought, if the projects reaches its critical mass, 
>>we should maybe also think about protecting the name, so as not to 
>>finish in the same mess as another now defunct project which was called 
>>NetSaint. If it makes it into KDE, then it will have a broader 
>>visibility, and KDE has protected most of its names.
>>    
>>
>
>What do you mean with protecting. In Germany (and I could only speak for
>German laws, because I'm a little bit familar with it) the name Umbrello
>would be protected. So nobody else creating a software product is allowed to
>name it Umbrello, because we were the first to name a product like this. But
>it would be possible to name another brand for a car or food Umbrello,
>because the brands would operate in different fields.
>It would be possiblle to add a brand, but this is very expensive and there
>is no office where you can protect your brand for all over the world. This
>would mean to protect the brand in Europe, USA, China ...
>  
>

NetSaint was being developed by a guy, and when it reached the level of 
maturity and user base, a company claimed that they had the names 
registered. They had not registered the name NetSaint, but similar ones 
with 'saint' in it. Though this ended up in no real legal battle, it put 
enough pressure  on the guy developing it, and eventually forced him to 
change the name to avoid the hassle.
The full story is written by himself here: 
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=541144&forum_id=8071

He changed the name, and registered it (it's now 'nagios'). This gives 
at least some legal timestamp for knowing who is the owner of a name, 
and it also makes sure there are no obvious similitudes with other names 
in the same kind of service (a chocolate brand named Umbrello will 
probably be accepted). It will probably be of no use against MS or IBM, 
though...

Just a thought for those having their name in full letters on the web 
page :-)
--Pascal