On Monday, May 26, 2014 16:34:16 Elena ``of Valhalla'' wrote:
In other messages you mentioned that it wasn't you but your associate who blacklisted Aaron Seigo from using the EOMA name *and* from building an EOMA compatible products, the same associate who seems also to be not really interesting in contributing with the FLOSS community anymore.
Please keep in mind that not only did I never receive notice of such a "blacklisting" (email, phone, postal mail .. anything would have sufficed; the first I heard of it was on this list from Luke), but this followed over a year of QiMOD failing to meet project deadlines they committed to including a tablet case design and a functional PCB that worked with the EOMA68. Even simply getting EOMA68 samples for engineers to work with was a struggle as they sold samples to people rather than get them into the hands of people working on products, something I only found out after the fact by talking with people who had purchased them.
If, as it seems from those messages, it is your associate who has control over the EOMA specs, how can we be sure that the openness you want for it will be maintained?
That is really the key point, imho.
Controlling the EOMA68 trademark makes a lot of sense for the reasons Luke raised: to have a standard mean anything you need product compliance, and the best tool for enforcing that is a program of testing with the reward being access to a controlled bit of intellectual property (e.g. a brand).
However, that trademark needs to go into a properly designed organization with a published and transparent mandate that defines that body's responsibilities and limits. QiMOD knows this, as we talked about this a number of times. It hasn't happened, and I wonder if it ever will.
It could have been worse, though: their original plan, as they shared it with me, was to use *patents* to control the EOMA68 standard via licensing. Personally, I found patenting an open hardware platform a bizarre approach in the context of "open hardware". I tried to talk them out of leveraging patents and recommended using trademark instead, which they appear to have adopted.
To my knowledge, they are making these decisions without what I would consider sufficient legal council (self-filing patents, not having a lawyer specializing in IP on retainer, etc.) That ought to be a warning flag for those wanting to participate with EOMA68.