Subject: Re: Please Read -- removed AbiWord Personal
From: Eric W. Sink (eric@abisource.com)
Date: Sat Apr 14 2001 - 10:41:33 CDT
Sam,
My apologies if there was a misunderstanding. I did not realize you
were still waiting for anything from SourceGear on this. I thought
I had *already* given you the okay to do what you just did (in a
private conversation which you and I had).
In other words, as far as SourceGear is concerned, the 'AbiWord
Personal'
distinction is not needed.
We do hold trademarks on the AbiWord names and logos. In fact,
we recently received (finally) our registration papers for these
trademarks. Getting a registered trademark is a very long, tedious,
and expensive process. As I am writing this, my 3-yr-old daughter
walked by, and I realized that we applied for this trademark before
she was eating solid food. :-)
Anyway, that trademark gives us certain rights to control the manner
in which the marks are used. However, we have no objection to providing
broad discretion to the AbiWord developers.
In general, if anyone does something with the AbiWord marks that we
consider improper, we will gripe about it. You folks are not likely
to step over any boundaries that matter. The following guidelines may
give you some sort of idea as to what we consider appropriate:
-- Continue to acknowledge our trademarks in the app and related
materials:
AbiWord and AbiSource are registered
trademarks of SourceGear Corporation.
-- Use the AbiWord names only when referring to AbiWord. Don't
take a completely unrelated word processor codebase and rebrand it
as AbiWord.
-- Don't do anything illegal with AbiWord's distribution. Don't
steal the WordPerfect code base and copy/paste from it. :-)
-- Don't do anything embarrassing with AbiWord. Don't turn it into
a distribution scheme for porn or spam. [ Note that the GPL is still
available to you. If you want to embarrass yourself with the AbiWord
codebase, you have SourceGear's blessing, as long as you don't call
it AbiWord. :-) ]
-- Don't make a lot of money with AbiWord. Anybody who wants to be
in the business of AbiWord in a big way needs to cut a deal with
SourceGear. Our terms would be very reasonable. [ Here again, the
GPL still applies. If you're not calling it AbiSomething, make all
the money you want. ]
In other words, I seriously doubt that the AbiWord developers need
to give much concern to SourceGear's ownership of the trademarks.
You guys seem quite focused, building the best cross-platform Open
Source wordprocessor in the world. SourceGear is proud of what AbiWord
has become, and of the people who are making it happen.
And so am I.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sam TH" <sam@uchicago.edu>
To: "AbiWord Dev" <abiword-dev@abisource.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 14, 2001 9:33 AM
Subject: Please Read -- removed AbiWord Personal
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat Apr 14 2001 - 10:34:43 CDT